A Killer Trade

When I was a Sophomore in High School, I had and still have an obsession with reptiles due to their sometimes astonishing beauty and fascinating personalities. At the time I really wanted a pet reptile, so much so I would go searching in the woods for one, and I would always want to go to Petco just to see the reptiles that they had. And one day I had finally found one but I didn’t find it where I thought I would.

It was sometime during Winter, I was in my room gaming as per usual when out of nowhere my sister yells at me to come see something. I reluctantly got out of my bed and rush downstairs and into the basement where she was pointing at something in the dark corner of the room, and when I stepped towards it to get a better look I realised what I was looking at was a massive gardener snake. Shocked from the disbelief I went ahead and grabbed it without thinking but it didn’t bite or even try to because it was winter and it was cold which I realized immediately and nursed it back to health for a while. It was a few weeks after I found the snake and brought it back to decent health when someone, let’s just call them Steve, called me and requested a trade. The trade consisted of two of his fully grown, “healthy” lizards for my snake, with a bonus, temporary enclosure. Of course the trade sounded great and the trade itself was great because the type of lizard I was getting were fully grown with plenty more years in both of them and that usually would cost well over $100 for each of them and all I had to do was create an enclosure for them which I did for under $100 after the trade which I had agreed to with little to no hesitation. After the trade with Steve I was ecstatic to have the lizards but I never realized why he was offering me such a great trade and a bit after I found out why. It was a few months after the trade I still had the two lizards in good health although with some issue as I realized they had never had real food before as they were fed only reptile pellets for their whole lives when they were supposed to have mostly greens like vegetables and sometimes fruits so they were pretty picky about their food but I eventually fixed that and got them to eat real food. So after this discovery I asked to see the snake I had traded with him and made a horrible realization that it had starved to death because Steve had forgotten about it due to “reasons” I can’t explain, and obviously I wasn’t very happy about it. But of course this trade has taught me something important, and that’s to look at every angle of any situation you’re in no matter what. Although the death of the snake I had tried so hard and for so long to bring back to health had been pretty much killed, I realized that if I didn’t make the trade the two lizards I had received could have been the victims instead. So basically I traded one life to save two others, unknowingly of course, but that also taught me how to see light in the darkness. And because of this “Killer Trade” I received two valuable life lessons that I still use almost constantly to this day.

“Churro the bearded dragon” by distar97 is licensed under CC BY 2.0