I had a couple of tarantulas when I was a kid.
I would consider it if you lived nearby although I think it might be best to keep mine as a single. I love mine. He is adorable, sweet, docile, tame, clean, and fairly easy to take care of. What is the issue with yours? I know that chinchillas vary a lot in personality so you may just have one that isn’t well suited to you (or maybe anyone).
As a kid I read about animals voraciously, and I became the neighborhood expert on all snakes, insects, or other creatures that people wanted identified. Eventually, I would take on injured or abandoned critters like racoons, possums, snakes and more. Since I loved reptiles, I had many of every kind there was. When I reached 400 snakes, my mom finally said “enough”, and I started purging.
I had a baby Barred Owl follow me home on a hike one day. He followed me to my patio, and sat on a nearby branch. I went to the fridge, got some chicken, and put it on the patio table for him. He stayed with me for about 6 years. My sister named him William. (as in The Bard) 
He would fly in from the barn, snatch a hapless bird from the bird feeder, and sit on the patio table or chair and rip it apart as we sat at the table. Freaked my mom out every time.
Good Times…
In time, I got a raptor license so I could rehab the birds that people brought me, so I often had owls, hawks, and falcons around.
I had a pair of Hyacinth McCaws, as well as other flavors of McCaw and parrots but had to give them away when my son started getting tall enough to reach their cages. He was born with 10 fingers, and we wanted to keep it that way.
Never had a monkey or a wolf, although I wanted them.
Probably just as well. I hear they’re trouble.
I had a pet rock when I was a kid, but he was very shy. I went to school one day, and apparently he ran away when my mother cleaned my room. She says he jumped out the window.
He’s very, very high-strung. I’ve had him for eight years and he still hasn’t mellowed out. He won’t let anyone pick him up. He pees everywhere and humps all his stuffed animals, especially when guests come over. Doesn’t bite though, so at least there’s that.
I had a guinea pig who could climb stairs, which is pretty exotic behavior for a rodent.
A skunk. Ask me about her.
Would you tell me about your skunk, please?
Thought you’d never ask.
My uncle had some funny ideas. One of them was our home needed a skunk. Apparently a goldfish, a hamster, a luna moth hatching out of a cocoon, a dog and two cats wasn’t enough. So he set a skunk trap one day.
Exactly how one specifies that only skunks will be welcome in the trap I’ll never know. But the first night, he caught one. We sent for the vet, who performed the deodorization procedure.
But before the skunk could be shipped to her new home, a neighborhood child was playing with it and it got away.
Poor skunk. Not only was she without her natural protection, but she didn’t even know it. We were sad for several reasons.
But my uncle was determined. He set the trap again, and caught another skunk. We once again sent for the vet, who, upon arriving, said, “No charge for this visit. It’s the same skunk!”
Stupid skunk. Getting caught twice. What do they teach in skunk schools, anyway?
We named her “Tinker Bell.” We had a custom cage made, about 3 feet tall, as someone told us they liked to hold their tails high. But after a while, keeping her in the cage seemed cruel, so we opened the door and let her roam the basement. She made a bed behind the furnace of clothes torn off the laundry line. Our basement was made bug and rodent free very quickly, and we supplemented what she caught with mostly dog food, IIRC.
In case you are wondering, a deodorized skunk has no offensive smell at all.
We had dogs and cats upstairs who were intensely curious, but we never allowed Tinker Bell to mingle. I was too young to remember much more, but she wasn’t a lap pet. She came up the stairs at dinnertime and scratched at the door until we gave her three nuts (my mother claimed she could count). And we had to tell the meter readers or appliance repairmen that if they saw a skunk, to not panic and just ignore her. If I had been a practical joker, I would have reveled in NOT telling them, but our family had ethics. Darn.
A year later, we wanted to take a lengthy family vacation, and neither my uncle or any of the neighbors would volunteer to take care of Tinker Bell for us. We approached George Vierheller, the director of the local zoo, to see if he would accept a donation. He said he was up to his tail in skunks, but ours had such a nice, white, clean stripe that he found a spare cage anyway.
For several years after that, the kids from my mother’s grade school would catch grasshoppers and other juicy bugs in the field behind the school and we would take them to the zoo. Mr. Vierheller let us go behind bars and feed Tinker Bell by hand. What a treat! Food that jumps and crawls, what a challenge! I’m not sure who enjoyed it more, the skunk or the kids.
I understand Tinker Bell died a natural death at the zoo, probably living much longer than she would have in the wild. When I think about it, it was probably good that my uncle didn’t want us to have a porcupine.
So that’s the story. Was it worth it?
Not exotic, but when I was a child we had a spider monkey. Her little ET fingertips felt so good on my face.
Thank you Musicat. Yes, it was.
Oh, I am sorry. I have heard that some of them are like that. My mother had one for a while that was the same. Mine isn’t like that at all. He looks like a stuffed animal and is even more adorable than they are and he is sweet with anyone that he knows. He loves to cuddle and roll around in his large ball that I got for him. I let him run free sometimes because he loves that but I worry that he will bite an electrical cord and get killed. The good and bad thing about chinchillas is that they can live an exceptionally time especially for small animals. 20+ years is not unheard of.
I grew up a large amount of land with a science teacher for mother. We ended up with lots of exotic pets over the years and I have known people that had many others. I had a pet baby alligator when I was about 5 but he died when the power went out and the bathroom he was in got too cold.
However, I knew someone that had a true full-grown alligator as his pet. His name was Skeeter Skinner. He was an older, eccentric train engineer and had a big pond behind his house. He raised ‘Baby’ (the alligator) from a tiny little thing into a 10+ foot behemoth. He loved that alligator and spoiled it to death. He could call her out of the pond on demand and she would heel. I witnessed it myself.
He would call ‘Here Baby, Baby, Baby!’ and you would see a swirl at some far corner of the pond and then she would just swim over and walk out. He would pat her on the head and she would open her mouth expecting to be fed. My father never let me and my brothers get closer than 20 get away from her while he was feeding it but I can attest that she was as tame as an alligator could be. I never witnessed it but Skeeter said he let her in the house sometimes. I worked in the only supermarket in town when I was a teenager. Skeeter always bought two frozen chickens for Baby and then tied them to each of the side mirrors on his truck so that they would defrost enough for her on the drive back home.
It was a true love story between a man and his alligator.
I have to agree with that. There are a lot of interesting animals my spouse and I would enjoy having, but we simply don’t have the means to properly care for them and I won’t keep an animal I can’t properly care for. I wish more people had that attitude, there would be a lot fewer cruelty cases and tragedies.
I had two pet dolphins.
Well, actually, they were research dolphins living in a laboratory. But I lived at the lab too, along with two grad students and one or two associate directors.
I usually got up around 6:00 each morning, before anything else was going on, and played with the dolphins for a few hours. They were especially into playing catch with volleyballs.
ETA: Stay tuned . . . I’ll see if I can dig up a pic to upload somewhere. This all was about 30 years ago.
Okay, here’s a photo of the dolphins. That’s not me behind the tank, but the building in the far background has a room where I lived.
ETA: The dolphins’ names were Phoenix and Akeakamai. They were famous!
I wish. I want a millipede but my fiance would probably kill me if I brought one in the house. 
In undergrad I had a pair of emperor scorpions. Huge suckers, about 7-8 inches long, but not very agressive as scorpions go, if you move slowly and carefully you can let them crawl into your hand and pick them up. I had surprisingly few takers on this for some reason.
Whe my wife was a kid she had a pet skunk and a cat that was half-bobcat, half-housecat. Strangely she is not interested in getting either of these now.
I used to have a water dragon, chickens, shrimp, crayfish, frogs, snakes, salamanders, crabs, newts, blood worms, crickets, mealworms, ants, mantids. I currently have an exotic plant called a Nepenthes.