Are Ant Farms The Best Pet Option For Children?

If you are thinking about a pet for your child, you should definitely think about ant farms. And this is why. If you think back to your own childhood, you'll soon realize that usually, apart from the family dog or cat, the first contact that a child has with animals is with insects. They see them around them in the garden, they can watch them at close quarters as they crawl around and they will probably end up killing a few before they're done! But the fascination of insects, their alien appearance, their odd behavior, never goes away for some people and, if you can capture that interest at an early age you'll be on the path to bringing up a sensitive and responsible child who shows a respect for other animal forms.

That is the reason that insects as a group, and ants in ant farms especially, make the best pets for children (and adults too if you ask me). Please note, that although I'm calling them pets, ants in an ant farm are really not the same thing as a house cat or dog. No cuddles, no throwing a ball or stick to be retrieved, no snoozing in front of the fire. And this is true of spiders, amphibians and reptiles too of course. What we're discussing here are small creatures that have an educational value for children, both in terms of nature study but also social responsibility too. And ants in an ant farm is as small as you're likely to get.

Scientific research shows that adults who have had the responsibility of caring for a pet when they were a child tend to be more responsible and sensitive parents than those who never had a pet as a child. It?s obvious really, if you have learned, at an early age that bad things happen when your pets are not looked after properly, then this sort of information is going to be very useful when dealing with small babies and children.

So what options do we have? Well, it makes sense to think about running costs need to think about running costs. Some of the bigger, and to my mind, more exciting insects come from tropical climes and will need heated accommodation if they are not to die. It's also true that insects like praying mantis and some others will only consume live prey so there might be a certain outlay on food insects to be considered.

For all of these, the running cost is very small, compared to having a big dog in the house although it has to be said that keeping insects and having a dog are two completely different things.

Once set up, unless you have special lighting, an ant farm costs nothing to run. You can populate it with ants from your own back yard and you can feed them on a few biscuit crumbs now an again. Could anything work out less expensive that that? In my opinion, for small children, an ant farm will be the most entertaining and interesting of all the options open to you.