Ally's Eight-Legged Journey

Yesterday I was rather aggressively threatened with a "ban hammer" in one of the tarantula groups that I joined for educating myself on my spiders. They jumped on me instantly, for posting this photo of myself "handling" my tarantula, and promoting bad animal husbandry, without even asking the circumstances. In this particular picture (below) I had accidentally knocked Lolth's enclosure onto the floor and he had free fallen 3 feet down to the ground and landed on my sock. I picked him up before he went onto my pesticide-infused carpets (I also have two cats, and cats come with the risk of fleas, so my carpets are flea treated - unfortnuately, flea treatment is no observer of species!) and took a photo to be able to assess damage before I put him into another enclosure. Once I was sure that Lolth was okay and I had calmed down, I then posted the picture to a group asking about tarantulas life stages as I was wondering whether he was a spiderling or a juvenile - a...

Living where I do, just walking into a shop and buying a spider isn't an easy task. Actual pet shops are few and far between, and in general I don't even like them. With my fish, I prefer to get them from a specialist store - Someone who knows their livestock inside and out, can give me accurate care information, and can help when things go wrong. Why would this be any different for a spider? I have done some looking around, and due to my not being able to drive, my best option for getting my pet spider is mail order. This makes me so anxious. There are a lot of webstores around which will ship out a jumping spider. There are even a lot of independent breeders I could buy from on social media, and then there are those less reputable people who go out into the world and catch the spiders from the wild for a profit. (Fortunately, due to Phiddipus regius being an American species, the number of these latter people in the UK appears to be next to none). Fortunately, whil...