As A Kid,

I and some of my friends,

always seemed to have a few unusual pets about the place, in the summer time we would go to Keston Common and collect a few lizards from under the gorse bushes, (if you were quick enough to catch them), or to Millers Pond and the waste ground behind it looking for frogs and newts, activities all now banned I guess, but great fun in the big outdoors then, not to mention store bought critters like tortoises and terrapins, but one thing I cannot remember any one keeping was spiders, but it seems that nowadays keeping them is quiet popular if the latest 29th annual exhibition of the British Tarantula Society is anything to go by, 

it was held on May 18 in Coventry, West Midlands, and attended by more than 30,000 tarantulas and their enthusiastic keepers, and above is the star of the show, a Socotra Island Blue Baboon spider, (Monocentropus balfouri), owned by Mike Dawkins, a relative newcomer to the tarantula-keeping community who had entered the competition for the first time, 'it was my first entry,' said a delighted Dawkins, who started keeping tarantulas in 2011 and has already built up a menagerie of about 60, 'I was very surprised to win Best African Species, let alone the Best in Show, that really shocked me,'

so is a tarantula the pet for you?, this from Ray Hale, a veteran judge at the show since 2005 and a British Tarantula Society member for more than 20 years, 'Tarantulas really do make an ideal pet, they're easy to keep, they don't smell, they carry no diseases that are communicable to man, and they can live up to 30 years, they don't require much space either, being quite content to live within the confines of a modest aquarium, in the wild, they stick very close to their burrows and seldom stray,' Hale said, 'an aquarium for them is just about the right size, this myth of tarantulas creeping through the jungles is just that, a myth', and I guess you can buy one to suit your decor as they come in a variety of colours, red, blue, green, brown, black, spotted, striped, and multicoloured, but for me I think I will leave tarantula keeping to others, I have enough to do with the fish!