Working in a factory has its benefits. You get to keep the animals you find, and if you're really lucky, they're pregnant. Then you score a whole bunch of free animals.

You see, when the road that you work on isn't even on the map, you must know that you aren't alone. Often you'll be going to grab a rag or something and you get a handful of spider instead. This one time I even had a boomslang fall out a tree and land next to my foot.

The thing about factory animals is that they aren't very popular. If someone comes across one while laboring away, it can very easily receive an uppercut to the left jaw. So I've somewhat earned the responsibility of intervening when they're uncovered, being the only member of staff prepared to kindly move the dude elsewhere.

This particular day my boss was busy lifting something when I hear “Wes! Come fetch”. That's factory talk for “Take this fucker or I'm gonna squash it”.

It was a massive scorpion (apparently an opisthacanthus), and having kept a scorpion which died before I really got to know it, I was keen on getting another one. So I took it home in a container and I had a new pet.

It was surprisingly active for a scorpion, not doing much burrowing (which would have been common for it's type), but instead it was out and about, a real socialite.

Which is why I was concerned when I never saw any movement in the tank for a few days. I eventually peered in and saw what I thought was another dead pet covered in maggots, but on closer inspection the maggots had little pinchers and tails. “It” was in fact a mom. Yep, scorpions can be pregnant for a really long time, I think even longer than humans. So, what does one do with 40 odd scorpions? Sell 'em to your mates! They're the coolest pets ever.

Just feed them a cricket weekly and make sure they have lots of water. You can get crickets at just about any pet shop, and you even get them in different sizes. It's the weirdest thing, boxes of live “manufactured” crickets. When they get older you can feed them bigger crickets, cockroaches, meal worms and even baby mice.

I'm selling them for R65 each. Apparently they aren't that poisonous but I haven't been stung yet so I can't say for sure. They're 6 months old, hunt independently and are UV sensitive, which means if you put them under UV lights they glow radioactive green! Life expectancy is about 5 yrs and I seriously think they would outlast cockroaches if we had a Chernobyl incident*. I have 10 left for sale, so if you're interested, mail me.

*there will be no guarantee if we do have such an incident and if, for some strange reason a cockroach manages to survive longer*