What’s the most unusual pet you or your family has ever had? Cats and dogs are fairly usual pets in the average household, but I was wondering about some of the more unusual pets that my friends online have had in their lives, so I asked them!
I posted: “I want to hear from you about the UNUSUAL pets you’ve had or have now! have a lot of questions for you!
“What was the pet? Where did the pet come from? How did you find the pet and why did you decide to adopt it? Tell us the pet’s story!
“What were the problems, if any, with the pet? What were the joys of having this pet?
“Would you recommend this kind of pet to a friend?
“How long did you have the pet? How long does this kind of pet live? Was veterinary care for this kind of pet easy to find or not? Were there health issues? Was health care for the pet expensive?
“What do these pets eat? How are they housed?
“Would this kind of pet be appropriate for a family with children?”
I asked: “Please tell us what we should know about this particular pet!”
Here are some more of the very interesting answers that I got. Enjoy!
Doug Kelley (Washington) Great horned owl for a month one summer out on the Little Spokane River.
Jasmin Henry (Georgia) A hedgehog. We found it in the fall when I was growing up in Germany and it was too small to survive hibernation. So we kept it over the winter and released it in the spring. His name was Oscar.
Marilyn Wolf (Indiana) Praying mantis, pig (not pygmy), baby groundhog, wild skunk that we kept loose in the house with cats and dogs (she never sprayed).
Christine Phoenix (Washington) Armadillos!
Michelle Brady (Washington) I have many exotic pets. My Schneider’s Skink is the best. She came from a local reptile store, but was caught from the wild and had a huge parasite load. Finding a vet that sees reptiles is not easy, and I spent hundreds on her care plus months of medication given orally every day. You can avoid that by getting a captive-bred lizard, but sadly Schneider’s Skinks are hard to breed. She eats bugs like roaches that I feed her with tongs, and prepared diets a few times a week. She should live 20+ years, but it’s hard to say how old she was when we got her. She lives in a 50-gallon tank with heat, UVB, bioactive soil, and live plants. She is very friendly and will come out to hang on my shoulders or head. She knows her name (Zoe) and comes when called.
Photo by Michelle Brady
Bonnie Hess (Pennsylvania) Chameleons, gerbils, five turtles when I was little (named Ernie, Meenie, Minie, Moe, and Greenie), and three tanks of tropical fish, As an adult: a ball python and two lizards (my granddaughter’s, actually). Growing up, we saved the lives of hurt birds, bunnies whose mother was killed, and basically any injured animal. Pets I had were rabbits, dogs, and cats … but the animals above were loved as pets as well. Even the fish! Oh … and three parakeets. They talked and were very tame! Peter (from when I was very little until grammar-school age) would sit on our shoulders while we ate. He talked a lot and said things like “Bonnie, brush your hair”… always the things my mom would repeat to me to do.
Maureen Annie Patrick Town (Washington) A very large bullfrog. My boys were toddlers and named him Carname. We owned him for years. He ate once a week—20 goldfish. He was awesome!
Tamara A Howard (New Jersey) I adopted the school science-project crayfish, and then the class gerbil. I also cared for my mom’s squirrel and a chameleon that was my brother’s. I, of course, had the usual little salmonella turtles and grasshoppers a-plenty (that I set free lest they perish on my watch). I was drawn to what was unusual, weird, injured, or considered too creepy to bother with. I loved the pups and kittens we had, including the bobcat, wild as it was, and still have the fondest memories of every species I had the opportunity to learn from and care for. As an adult, I had a chinchilla that I loved dearly, a ferret that showed up at my front door, and a very large bird that was my ex’s that was amazing once provided with veterinary care, a larger cage, and enrichment. The bird did speak two words: my first name and “cookie,” each and every time I came home. I guess that says everything about our relationship—and yes, a cookie was always provided!
Telani Lasoleille (Tennessee) We didn’t have any unusual pets, per se. We had a fish tank that someone gave us, along with all the fish and a couple eels. I guess the fish that had been put together had been well chosen to be balanced for their ecosystem. One day, my brother was out and about and found some crayfish. He brought them home and added them to the tank. Within two to three days, the crayfish had (mostly) eaten the eels, leaving dead eels with chunks torn out of them, frayed flesh drifting off their bodies, floating around in the water. It pretty much destroyed the ecosystem, and we ended up getting rid of the whole thing.
Andrea Burggrabe (Indiana) An African clawed frog from my teacher. We got to watch them grow from tadpoles to adults, and then I got to adopt one when it was time! I really wanted a pet and my mom said no to a dog, so I ended up with a frog instead. The frog lived for almost 20 years. She was sassy and fun. I trained her to do a few things. Outside of cleaning her tank, she was pretty easy to care for. Great pet, but they live a long time, so you definitely want to be prepared for that!
Savannah Pavo Real (California) Spider monkey.
Sheri McEachran (Washington) When I was young I found a snapping turtle I named Snappers and took home. I was always bringing (usually hurt) critters home to take care of and release. I fed this turtle raw hamburger. Snappers would open his/her mouth at supper time and make “turtle noises.” Sometimes people in those days would drill a hole in the edge of a turtle’s shell for a leash—awful practice—but Snappers had one. Several days later, I released Snappers in a pond about a half mile away from our home. About a week later, I heard turtle noises on the patio. I ran outside and saw a snapping turtle with a hole in the edge of its shell and mouth open waiting for raw hamburger! I was overjoyed. Snappers crawled back!
Kathleen Huggins (Washington) Pig in dorm room at Washington State University. Strictly against the rules.
Jill Gibbs (Montana) Mallard duck named MacDonald. My brother incubated duck eggs in grade school. MacDonald was the lone survivor of the six eggs he started with. MacDonald lived in a converted sandbox most of the year. In the winter he lived in a straw-lined cage in the garage. He was a horrible pet. Not recommended for children. He would run us down in the backyard and if you were wearing shorts, he would give you blood blisters. The most entertaining thing he ever did was attempt to be our ‘watch duck.’ My parents had a utility box in their fenced backyard for the whole neighborhood. A service person decided to climb the six-foot privacy fence instead of coming to the door to be escorted. MacDonald went after him like a Rottweiler and treed the trespasser. We could hear someone yelling for help in our backyard. When we looked out the door, he said, “Can you call off your duck?” MacDonald went to the same veterinarian our dog went to. The local newspaper did a story on him through interviews with his doctor. MacDonald lived for 12 years. Unheard-of for a mallard. We have so many stories of him and his exploits.
Dave Wilson (Ohio) A tegu. Komodo dragon’s smaller cousin.
Lonnie Olson (Michigan) I had all kinds of different pets growing up, but I can’t top any of these wonderful stories! I had an anole named Herkimer. I never wanted to keep any of my pets in cages, so I let them run loose around my bedroom. The painted turtle liked to climb up on my notebook that was under my dresser. Herkimer slept inside a large plastic doll that I kept on my dresser. At night, he would climb across my body and get to the window and hang out on the screen where he would catch bugs. One morning when I was having a friend over, I went to open the shade and I didn’t see Herkimer stuck to the blind, and when the thing rolled up, it got uneven on the one side Herkimer was in rolled up. So I got him out of there, but he was severely bruised for a few days, and I don’t remember him living much longer after that. After owning geckos and iguanas and veiled chameleons and snakes and turtles and hermit crabs, I came to the conclusion that we were not meant to keep captive the beautiful animals that should be in the wild. So I don’t have any exotic pets any more. Of course there is still Gertrude, the Blandings turtle who lives here at the camp. We see her wandering through occasionally. She doesn’t show the least bit of fear toward humans, so we stop and talk to her for a while. Then there was the time that two huge mama garter snakes both had their babies in the crawlspace pit. They couldn’t get out and it seemed like there were 200 babies in there. They were so cute, but I knew that my back yard could not support an additional hundred snakes, so I climbed down there with a bucket and I picked up all of the little baby snakes and I drove down the road with my golf cart as if I was Johnny Appleseed and I let go a couple here and a couple there and just kept sprinkling baby garter snakes all over the woods all the way down the road.
Simon Gadbois (Nova Scotia) Define unusual … mmh … Northern flying squirrel.
Sarah Langevin-Gaspar (Florida) Three bears (we had all of the federal certifications/state certs), one of which lived in our house as it was so small and had been brought across state lines illegally; wolves; and then run-of-the-mill dogs/cats.
Maureen Jones Smith (Washington) When I was a kid growing up in Utah, we lived near a large field at the edge of our suburb. My brother, Danny, was three years older than I was and he loved going to the field to catch horned toads, lizards, and snakes. We had tanks for each kind. I learned to catch them too, and neighbors would call our house if there was a snake in their house or yard that they wanted removed. The little lizards were sooo cute, but they bit the hardest and they locked their jaws so that removing them from my finger was difficult. I had to use my other hand to squeeze the hinge of the jaw to get it to let go. We fed them insects for the most part. We had horned toads, whiptail lizards, blue and green racer snakes, garter snakes, and gopher snakes. Some of the larger snakes ate mice that my brother caught or bought at the pet store. At times we had several reptile tanks, mostly under our awning on the back patio, but my brother usually had one tank in his room, too.
The largest pet lizard we had when we were young was a gila monster. They are venomous but move pretty slowly, so it didn’t do any damage. They do eat mice and other small animals. I didn’t really want to be around that guy. I did like the iguana that my brother had for a time. My favorites were the horned toads because I could pick them up and let them run on me. As my brother got older, it became apparent to me that he should have been born at the time the West had ‘fur trapper’ as a career choice! He could catch a fish with his bare hands more quickly than if you used a fishing pole. He came home with a huge catfish one time and put it in our bathtub. There was a huge live catfish swimming in our tub! I think that most of these pets were eventually returned to the wild.
Mom and dad were pretty tolerant of our pets, but the last straw was the monitor lizard that my brother purchased. (I wasn’t living at home any longer.) The monitor was huge and it hissed and guarded his room. Before mom evicted the monitor, it bit my brother. Their bites are vicious! It was a wound as large as my hand, on both sides of his leg! Their teeth are razor sharp, they have venom and the bacteria in their mouths can cause infection. Danny had to do something he really hated: he had to seek medical attention. In fact, one of the other rare times he went to a hospital was after being bit by a rattlesnake he was trying to catch. In both cases he was an adult, so there’s no help for that kind of idiocy! After the monitor bit him, he didn’t have a problem giving it away—with warnings, of course.
When my grandson was 12, he wanted a pet snake. My brother graciously offered to get one and brought a small blue racer he’d caught for him. We liked the snake, but this little guy did not love captivity. We hoped he’d get used to his large tank with lots of grasses, water, and wood, but he didn’t. He started pounding his little snout on the side of the glass. It was heartbreaking. As I got older it became clear to me that putting a wild animal in a cage wasn’t kind. I explained to my grandson that the snake missed his family and the large, grassy area and lake he came from. One weekend we drove out to the area the snake had been taken from and returned him. When my grandson was 14 he asked for a leopard gecko for his birthday. Lucy is a beautiful lizard we adopted from a person who rescued them from bad situations. My grandson is 22 years old now and has his own son who is being raised knowing Lucy as well as their dog. He’s being raised to know and love animals of all kinds and how to properly care for pets of all species.
Thanks to all our friends around the world for sharing their “unusual pets” stories!
