Going Beyond The Borders Of Being A Helpful Pet

Awesome, England, Home, Parents/Guardians, Pets & Animals, Safety, UK | Related | December 6, 2022

This was back when my border collie and I still lived at my parents’ house. I owned a bearded dragon who was kept in my bedroom. One night, I was downstairs focusing on college work and my mum had gone up for a shower. My dog was relaxing next to me. All of a sudden, he bolted upright, staring ahead with his head to one side. Then, he took off upstairs.

At the time, I didn’t think much of it; he sometimes liked to greet the resident humans after their traumatic time in the shower. I thought my mum had just come back out and he wanted to make sure she hadn’t drowned. But then, I heard a yell from upstairs.

Mum: “[My Name], your bedroom is full of smoke!”

I ran upstairs and found out that, indeed, the room was full of smoke. Something had gone wrong with the heat lamp in my bearded dragon’s enclosure. Perhaps the lizard had been climbing and the fitting wasn’t tight enough, but the whole thing had spun toward the back of the wooden vivarium and was slowly burning through. And yes, I do still kick myself about this. It was an eighty-watt bulb pointing at wood. You can imagine.

It turned out that my mum had come out of the bathroom to see my dog scratching at my bedroom door. She’d opened it, and that’s when she’d seen the smoke.

I immediately took the lizard out and put him in a temporary enclosure while I made sure his usual was completely free of smoke and while my dad drilled the fitting in place.

That was probably eight years ago. My border collie is now almost twelve, and my bearded dragon sadly passed away in 2021, aged thirteen. My dog still loves to check in on his little critter friends, now consisting of a hamster and guinea pigs! In fact, the hamster has moved into the four-foot-long refurbished and hamster-proofed vivarium my lizard used to live in. It still has the burn marks. I still feel terrible. But I’m eternally grateful to my pooch for that and all the times he’s tolerated and supported me through poor mental health.