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Day 59 - The Dark Side of the Rainbow

The froglets still have a pinkish hue due to their transparent skin. As they grow older, the color will settle closer to white. Unfortunately, due to their light skin, albino African Clawed Frogs are sometimes sold as "Rainbow Frogs," "Tutti Frogs," and other various names as cheap 'designer' pets. Contrary to the cheerful sounding names, the creation process for so called 'rainbow frogs' are anything but. Young frogs have needles shoved into their bodies in order to inject dyes under their skin. This often results in severe damage to the internal organs, shock due to trauma, or poisoning from toxic dyes. Many of the frogs don't recover from the damage and may end up dying within weeks or even days of the injections. If the frogs do survive, past the first few months, the ink will mostly fade.

Due to the blotchy results that from needle injection dying produces, there is a second, more common, method nowadays that involves throwing the frogs into an acid bath to strip their protective slime coat (essentially, the closest parallel health-wise would be you having your epidermis burned off), of the few who do survive this process, they are immediately tossed into a dye bath, followed by a solution to regrow the slime coat over the now colored skin. If the frog manages to survive long enough, the gaudy neon ink just wears off in a few months anyway.

This helps to contribute to the misconception that these frogs only live for a few months before they go belly up. In reality, if an African Clawed Frog has been cared for properly their whole life, rather than being abused by unethical shop owners, they can live for up to 30 years! They'll outlive any dog by years if raised by an informed owner, if you ever encounter any "rainbow" or "Tutti Frutti" frogs, please do not buy them! There's no justification for supporting animal abuse and there are plenty of breeders online who behave ethically.

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