Tarantulas are one of the cleanest animals out there. In fact I only half joke when I call em’ “8-legged cats”. They behave very much like cats. From persnickety bathroom habits, to fastidious feeding habits, to grooming.  Yep, they groom…and they can spend hours doing it. (Of course with eight legs, this stands to reason.)
They also don’t give a rat’s butt about you, the Keeper. Oh they will pretend like they do occasionally, usually when it gets around feeding time, but nope, like cats, you are merely an object to be suffered through most of the time.
Some of the more persnickety snots on the exotic pet boards in social media will wave their hands and scream that tarantulas don’t have these traits, that it is pure anthropomorphism, but I aquire the look in this meme picture and move along.


Observation requires some anthropomorphism. We use words to describe things, and in the case of an animal far removed from the family mammalia, sometimes colloquialisms are necessary to describe actions and observed behaviors.
In this case, I stand by my conclusion (however unscientific) that Tarantulas are distantly related to cats. As there is far more unknown than known about this animal (including the specifics to its vast sensory array), I’m sticking to this position.  heh.
So for this installment of Tarantula bits, I give you a short video of one of my “cats” grooming. Toward the beginning of the video, you can see it take a leg into the fangs. I call this “ye-old brushing of the teeth”.  At the time I started filming, it had already done the right side for about 30 minutes, gave itself a ten minute break, and started in on the left side. Hard work, all this grooming.

This Aphonopelma seemanni (black color form) cleans up after half wrecking…er redecorating…its enclosure. (After the video, it put some stuff back, and rearranged some cork bark..I kinda’ like the result.  Here we see the final inspection.  The cork bark piece upper right has been completely rearranged from my initial attempts at decoration.