ONE surefire way to electrify a dinner party is to start telling pet stories - often grotesque tales with very unhappy endings. Mine started last March, when the boy-next-door's tiny terrapin escaped one sunny evening in the back garden. For days, his mother hunted the grass verges, even raked the garden, but it was gone. Probably eaten by a cat, the boy reckoned. Now he wanted a lizard - but he didn't get it.
Soon after the terrapin escaped, there was a heavy snowfall, and we surmised that our reptilian visitor was a goner. But long after the neighbours had moved out, we found him at the end of our garden, near a couple of glowering frogs.
We picked him out, pawing the air, his bad-humoured little face scowling furiously. His shell was dusty-coloured, and there was a nick out of his carapace, but the eyes were diamond-hard and the skin was still beautifully coloured. Staggeringly, he had grown to about two inches in length, from chomping insects down by the warm west-facing wall. A cocky little late-Jurassic hard-case, heir to a proud lineage of great reptiles, he seemed to resent his froggy companions; glaring at this amphibian filth whose tadpoles he probably ate for breakfast.
We weren't keen on tracing the boy next door, so when the frosts came recently, we rigged up a DIY terrapin-support indoors in a plastic sink-basin, with a 40-watt bulb hanging over the side, some rounded stones for him to sun himself on (being coldblooded, this aids his digestion). And bask he did, elaborately stretching his claws out into laid-back sunbather's positions.
Whatever food we gave him, he attacked with malevolent lunges of his neck, messily tearing it asunder with his beak: lumps of raw fish; the queasy business of the slugs' eggs (which he snapped whole, then whooeed the shells back into the water); and what he did to a live slug would turn the hardiest stomach.
And as we peered into his bucket, at his camouflage-gear yellow and green stripes, his pinhole nostrils and the freak chelonian physique, we marvelled how a thing that small could produce so high a ming, no matter how often you changed his water.
Thanks to the web, we discovered he was a Red-Eared Slider - Chrysemys scripta elegans, to be exact; native to the US, but now intensively ranched for a pet trade which spreads it all over the developed world. But watching him climbing the basin walls, trying to escape, I began to fret that, even turning off the lamp at night, that we were messing up his body-clock - you know, that he might be depressed.
Soon our two-year-old had started driving the "fwog" around like a Matchbox car, and then we discovered that red-eared sliders carry salmonella. He was beginning to cause rows.
We asked a couple of pet stores if we could offload him. One guy laughed: "Are you mad? You can't get rid of terrapins for love nor money. We don't even sell them anymore." It was the same everywhere. A cult pet a few years ago, they are now almost universally unwanted. Then I saw a photograph in the Guard- ian of a snap-turtle, dozens of whose brethren and terrapin cousins are turning up in parks and ponds all over the UK. Someone else drew my attention to a full-page scarestory in London's Evening Standard - about a 20-inch snap turtle which had left ducks in the city's Greenwich Park without legs.
Phoning around, I was told Dublin Zoo had been forced to take measures to stop people releasing terrapins there. But David Fields, assistant director of Dublin Zoo, squelched that rumour underfoot. There had been the odd abandoned animal, he said - a goat left at the gate, and one terrapin found "in an atrocious condition" in a wash-hand-basin near the reptile house - but they had never been "inundated", and the new glass-fronted reptile enclosure is to prevent people pushing coins and litter, not terrapins, at the animals.
Sean Gibney of the DSPCA animal shelter in Stocking Lane: "We had a few of them sitting there for a year but nobody wanted them. When people buy them around the size of a 50p, they don't realise them that if you feed them properly, they grow to the size of a dinner plate."
Legislatively and in practice, the control over the importing, selling and owning of reptiles seems to be a grey area. Terrapins, like other chelonians are listed under Appendix 2 of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, while others such as the hawk's bill turtle are on the more urgent Appendix 1.
An interdepartmental group on exotic and dangerous animals was set up this year between the Departments of the Environment, Justice, Agriculture and the OPW, but little seems to have been done with draft legislation drawn up by the ISPCA two years ago. And although wildlife rangers run the occasional spot-check on pet shops, there have been no prosecutions that anyone can remember.
When thousands of terrapins flooded the market in recent years, their retail price of £3.50 and £5.95 was hardly an incentive to shell out the roughly £300 you need for tanks, water-filters, heat-mats, lamps, etc. With the negligible back-up information from petshops and the growing number of pet superstores, one can only assume that there has been a quiet little holocaust of terrapins to vitaminosis, getting flushed down the toilet, or simply let off in the nearest ditch.
SOME pet shops didn't return my calls, while one guy I doorstepped reminded me rather sharply of the Python parrot sketch. However Ben Lyons, a back-combed, black-clad, nose-pierced Goth who runs the specialist Reptile Haven shop in Mother Redcap's Market, talked happily, his walls piled high with snakes, bizarre lizards and the odd visiting reptile freak.
"Our policy has always been on a conservation basis. My breeding programme includes between 40 or 50 species: bearded dragons - they're my best sellers - pythons, dwarf boas, Asian rat snakes. Reptiles are being bred in captivity now in such large numbers that in the trade, the amount that are wild-caught has hugely decreased."
But how can he, realistically, vet his customers? "We refuse people all the time. After the first two or three questions, you have a fair idea of their mentality. By and large, we don't sell to under-10s or -12s, unless with serious parental guidance."
But Lyons provided me with a possible solution to my own terrapin-disposal problem. There was Graham Little, a Trinity science student, who keeps turtles in two large ponds in his brother's back garden. They have successfully overwintered for two years, steadily gaining weight as Little tries to ascertain whether they can reproduce here, with all the implications for endangered Irish species if these voracious little scavenger/carnivores gain a foothold here. So far, one female laid three eggs last May, but in the water rather than on the bank, which means they didn't survive, but it was a near miss.
In the end, I plumped for another enthusiast in Wexford, Declan McGowan, whose house and garden are colonised by turtles. On an errand in Dublin last weekend - collecting a Mexican axolotl - he picked up my terrapin, and brought it home. Later he reassured me that he has cleaned out a slight wound beside its back leg with an iodine solution, and it was now happily swimming around in a deep tank among his own, basking under a 24-hour full-spectrum light, and "eating like a horse". Under proper circumstances, the varmints can live up to 40 years and more - in other words, happily ever after.
Reptile problems? Contact Thomas McElheron of the Irish Herpetological Society 087-2840654, or Declan McGowan on 086-8348228