You guys should look into getting a pet lizard or something.
heh, our house has a few bluetonge lizards living around it. i leave little trails of banana peices around to coax them out of their hiding places so i can get a look at them. the biggest was nearly as long as my arm, which is ridiculous for a bluetongue, though i havent seen him in ages.
the one that lives around the back is great. when the door is open he comes in and nestles right up against my laptop power pack and refuses to move. this is a lizard the size of my foot and nearly as fat. when my sister tried to throw him out he finally took fright and tried to run, and his feet just slid on the polished wooden floor and he stayed in the one place. lot of people are pretty scared of bluetonges, as they bite really really hard and have a reputation for never letting go. i asked a guy at the australian reptile zoo about this and he said this is because most people run around waving their hand in the air with the lizard hanging off. and the lizard is smart enough to know if it lets go its going to go flying into the nearest wall and go splat.
also, when you corner them they puff right up to look big, open their mouth, which is bright orange inside with a flaming blue tongue, and hiss really loudly. generally guaranteed to freak the everliving shit out of most domestic pets and your average domestic human. always curious about what the dwarf fort two legged rhino lizard you find in badlands area would be like. frill neck lizards do one better - they open their massive frill, hiss, get up on two legs and chase you. i don't live far north enough to see them though. as you may have guessed, i love reptiles.
and you can allready make GCS into pets, i did it with the very first one i found in fort mode. set up cage traps, tunneled into its little chasm ledge, it chased the dwarf into the traps, then i tamed it with my dungeon master and put it up for adoption. my master engraver loved GCS for some reason, so he picked it up and it followed him everywhere and ate a few goblins when he was ambushed, though it lost a leg to an axegoblin. i wish you could milk them for venom and GCS silk.
i totally want to one day find a male and female one (do they have genders?) tame them, and then breed a massive number (can you do this? do they get pregnant and give birth or lay eggs or what?), cage them in a hallway and let them eat invaders. this could get interesting. do exotic pets give birth to tame young ones? i dont think there is a puppy or kitten mode for GCS. or dragons and other exotic pets for that matter. having mother give birth to a massive clutch of fully formed wild Giant Cave spiders in my main dining room would be an experience.
on the real life insect horrors. i love most crawly things along with reptiles and furry animals as well. (excluding maggots...) and generally go to great lengths not to kill spiders and things unless they are the very poisonous ones. though, as an amoral 8 year old living in canberra, i put a bull ant (thats the 3 cm or one inch flesh eating horrors with giant stinger to you foreigners) a redback (australian version of black widow) a huge centipede as long as my hand and a scorpion in a jar together.
the ant and spider went to the roof, where the ant savagely dismembered the redback who tried and failed to retreat and set some web up. then the ant sat there with the dead redback in its jaws on the bottom of the lid, as if to say "ive got my dinner now let me go home and eat it". the scorpion ignored everything till the centipede started trying to use it as a platform to get up the side of the jar, and it got annoyed and grabbed it and stung it a few times. afterwhich the scorpion had his peace and the centipede just ran around the edge of the jar trying to get up the side and away from the scorpion.
at the time i was a little disappointed. i wanted a battle royale with only one survivor, but it seems wild things are somewhat more pragmatic then that, and most wont want a fight unless they are forced. btw, there are many videos of such experiments on youtube, for those so inclined. interestingly preying mantis seems to win most often. even against mice and hummingbirds. fear the mantis!