REMEMBER when you asked for a dog and your parents palmed you off with one of these substandard substitutes, all worse than nothing?
Sea monkeys
How do you sell brine shrimp to kids? Call them sea monkeys and advertise them with a drawing of a wizened, cheerful creature smoking a pipe in a rocking chair. The creator of this con is living in a billion-pound mansion, laughing at children staring at a bowl of ugly little swimming prawns and wonder if anyone would notice if they flushed them.
Stick insects
You wanted to throw a stick for a lovely bouncing Labrador. Instead you were given the f**king stick to look after. In addition to being boring and crap, they bred like crazy so even when the original died you still had 50 disgusting offspring you resented owning and gave away at school.
Goldfish
The ultimate crap pet, a halfway house between animal and plant, bought so you could prove you could look after a pet. Proved the opposite by dying. Your mum swore it recognised her and had a personality, but she was projecting. It provided the companionship of a Birds Eye fish finger.
Gerbil
Hamsters had personality. Gerbils were desert mice on speed that slept all day and pissed all night. Constantly twitching in fear of predators, they couldn’t be played with and weren’t cute. Never actually died, but after escaping the 466th time the family tacitly agreed to stop looking.
Tortoise
Tortoises are cool for maybe the first year. But then they keep living and living and living, if you can call being largely comatose living. If it died then you wouldn’t have to pass this boring curse down generations like a slow-moving, lettuce-munching hereditary disease.
