They are fun, but they are not cheap. I’ve had mine for little under a year, and I’ve probably put in about $1000 bucks. Of course most of that was the cost of the dragon, plus lighting and tanks.
They area blast to own though. Unlike many lizards, they can be trained to actually like people. Most lizards dislike, or at least, are indifferent to people. My dragon will scramble to be taken out of her tank when I get home from school. She will the perch on my should when i walk around, or crul up underneath my blankets and pillow when I lie down.
I’ve been wanting a chinese alligator, alligator sinensis, for some time now. They only get to about 5 or 6 feet long, so they might cause a need for reconstructive surgery, but it’s unlikely one could kill me or even remove a limb. They’re really amazingly cute. Unfortunately, they’re CITES class 1 listed, so it’s unlikely I’ll be getting one any time soon. Besides, I don’t want one until I own a home and can set up a very large and permanent enclosure in which he or she can swim, lounge, and of course burrow.
I’d also love to have a lobster. I might have a Maine lobster, and perhaps also an emergency backup lobster. (Sorry, couldn’t resist) Actually, I think a painted cray would be great, but even a spiny reef lobster would be quite pleasing. Unfortunately, I probably don’t have the dedication or expertise to see to a proper saltwater tank. But, for the time being, I can just go for a swim and see spiny reef lobster in the wild.
Yet another exotic pet I want is a fruitbat. Actually, Mrs. Seng wants one more than I do. They’re really smart, trainable, and friendly. They’ll happily hang off your sweater while you wander around. I know someone who’s had two of them and she recommends them.
Finally, I wouldn’t mind owning a ring-tailed lemur. A female, of course, because the males secrete nasty stuff onto their tails and use them to have “stink fights.” Yuck. I don’t think I could really pay enough attention to a critter as smart as a lemur, though. Smart creatures make demanding pets. But wouldn’t it be fun watching him clamber around the house?
The snip is a must, of course. Wethers are not very odorous, but males give a new meaning to the word smelly. Has he been disbudded? I would strongly recommend that, as well. Goats will follow the habits of the “herd” (dogs and kids) and will be a delight to play with, but their use of horns is instinctive and you can get hurt badly by them. (They do not merely head-butt–they also swing their heads to hook or jab with the horns when they are irritated or fearful.)
You will also need to get used to trimming its feet. It is not difficult, but if you’re not familiar with how to do it, you may want to have someone show you the tricks of the trade (like a good set of cutters that stay sharp). The feet should be trimmed at least four times a year–possibly much more often if the goat is not running around on a rocky or concrete surface.
My family has always been full of “animal people”. My mom has an African grey parrot, a miniature Juliani pig, and two cats. When we visit, Jub-Jub (the pig) greets us at the door and “escorts” us into the living room. My mom taught her to do this with guests.
I have two cats, three dogs (A pit bull, a Bloodhound, and a Bassett for anyone who wants to know). I have two rats. I also have a kingsnake, a Burmese python, and two tarantulas. (Brachypelma smithii and Therphosa blondi) I had a savanna monitor lizard, but he passed away in October due to cancer.
Over the years I have had many cats, dogs, and rats, as well as a hamster, two guinea pigs, two ferrets, and a hedgehog. (Yes, they do poop a lot. But mine also enjoyed getting a bath. I used to scrub her spines with a toothbrush. One time she destroyed a biology textbook I left on the floor. Four-pound hardbound book, only took about 5 minutes to be reduced to a soggy mass.)
Tom, thanks for the advice. At what age do you suggest the snipping and the disbudding? I noticed that the other goat needs his feet trimmed, so if I learn how to do it, I’ll catch him too. Our horseshoer will probably be able to show me how - he’s a friend of ours.
ooOOoo… I’ve been looking for a smithii for a couple years, but it’s hard to find one locally. I used to work for a petstore and saw a few CB advertised after they hit the restricted list, but the price was way higher than I wanted to pay at the time, and I would have had to have it shipped, which I tend to be leery of with inverts and such. How are they to care for?
HBby said "A kinkajou is also another unusual pet that has caught my eye. " Yes, they’re cute as can be, intelligent, affectionate, and playful. And nocturnal.
I had a couple of them for a long time here in Oaxaca, along with a coatimundi, which is related to kinks but doesn’t look any more like them than an armadillo looks like a cow.
Both kinds are opportunistic feeders, which means that they wander around a lot poking into things. They are also ace escape artists, and could probably get out of a castiron safe (if anyone wanted to keep them in a safe, which sometimes seemed to me like a reasonable idea.)
Once loose, they could get into anything, and usually did. Also the kinks would apparently get lonely about three a.m every night and get into my bedroom and crawl under the covers to see if I didn’t want to play. They have sharp claws and teeth, and their idea of play involved a lot of scratching and biting, along with racing up and down and winding their very strong prehensile tails around my neck. Not conducive to a good night’s sleep.
The coati woke up about the time the kinks went to bed and was equally anxious to socialize, plus she would open and empty every drawer in the kitchen if I didn’t watch her like a hawk.
Another of her tricks, whenever a lady came to visit, was to sneak around being inconspicuous until she got a chance to steal the lady’s purse, which she would carry off to somplace inaccessible where she would empty it and swipe anything shiny, especially compacts and lipsticks, and hide them. And open packs of cigarettes, take out all the tobacco and spread it around. Useful if you are trying to give up smoking, which most of the ladies usually weren’t.
Anyway if you want a pet kinkajou you have to be willing to build a large and completely escape-proof cage with enough room to climb around, and to stay up late a lot playing with it; kinks are very social and don’t like being ignored.
Heh, everbody looks at me like I’m nuts when I say I’m getting a skunk. If you live in a legal state and are really interested, I can give you the names and contact info for several breeders in the US. Do a whole lot of research, though, before considering getting one–it’s certainly not like caring for a cat or dog. I’ve been preparing myself for the challenge for about three years
That’s the first time I’ve ever heard anyone, other than myself, utter those words! I don’t know you, bowert, but you just earned BIG points in my book!
Rubber Boas are AWESOME! I really wish I still had mine. I should warn folks, though, if you’ve never had a snake, Rubber Boas are not the snakes to start out with. They’re very demanding, and delicate. But, you have great taste!
I thought I knew all the tricks, but that’s a new one on me. Thanks!
I can second Mixie’s statement that 99% of all “My snake won’t eat” calls I got, when I was doing snake rescues, were about Ball Pythons. But, those were the easy ones. The rest were generally really sick snakes that took a lot more time, money, and care to bring back to full health.
I got mine from a breeder. Cost me $75 as a spiderling! It’s not unusual to see an adult female going for $350 these days. They’re fantastic spiders, colorful, large but not overly so, and extremely docile. (Watch out for the urticating bristles.) They’re very easy keepers, being a desert species and so not too particular about temperature and humidity. They’d make the ultimate beginner tarantula if it weren’t for the price.
If you’re seriously looking for a smithii I’d recommend checking out exotic pet shows. Herp shows almost always have a good invertebrate turn-out. I wouldn’t trust shipping live animals, either, especially spiders. It’s just too risky.
The earlier the better on both, as there is less trauma.
With the horns, if you wait too long, they may be too large for a standard disbudding iron to tackle, then you are stuck with getting them cut off with the attendant messy blood and possible infection.
The issue of infection (to say nothing of holding them during the procedure) is also true regarding the testicles. There are people who prefer banding to castrating with a blade, but my opinion is that one minute of trauma is better than walking around with the scrotum stuck in a tourniquet for a couple of weeks. And while I have heard of several cases of infections setting in with banding–even leading to death–I have never heard of the same thing when a blade was used. (Of course, that is anecdotal.)
If this is your first and only goat, you really don’t want to invest in the equipment or training for the castration and disbudding, so just take it out to a goat farm and have them do it. While you’re there, have them show you how to trim its feet. (Trimming horse hooves and goat hooves require different techniques. Your farrier may know how to trim goats, but he may not.) Checking your location to be sure you don’t appear on my doorstep. Yep, go find a goat owner to handle it.
We had an African Pygmy Hedgehog (which I think is the breed people commonly have here in the U.S.). Our neighbor found her balled up on the side of the road, but she must have been someone’s lost pet, not a wild creature.
She was cute as the dickens, very sweet, but you should have seen her industrial sized wheel every morning. Ewwww! She died last year and while I do miss her, I’m not rushing out to get another one.
Our family has a bearded dragon (I don’t have a picture posted anywhere, so you can just go look at Emperor Penguin’s lizard - they look a lot alike). I’ll second his caution that they can be pretty expensive pets, given their need for pretty large enclosures and strictly controlled lighting/temperatures. Our beardie is moderately social, but she’s still not convinced that I’m not going to feed her to one of those terrifying cats that always hang around her cage. And because we have Liz, we also keep a fair number of crickets around the house. I feel we should count them collectively as a pet, since they take almost as much upkeep as she does.
I’d like to put in a word of caution here, too. A lot of exotics really are cute and fun pets, but you really need to do your homework long before you get one. I’ve heard far too many sad stories about exotic pets dying unexpectedly because their owners just didn’t know how to care for them properly. Many reptiles will outgrow the average household’s ability to house and feed them safely; iguanas can get to the size of a couch and they can rip a room apart in the course of a day. A parrot may outlive you, and it needs far more social interaction than most people realize. Even box turtles, which most people assume can be kept loose in the back yard and tossed some vegetables now and then, need a lot of specialized care in order to truly thrive. It can also be very difficult to find competent veterinary care for your exotic. Most vets handle dogs and cats or farm animals only, and unless you live in a pretty large community there may not be a vet qualified to care for your pet within a reasonable driving distance.
Kitties, now, all they need is some decent food, a friendly lap, and a clean litterbox.
Here,Here,Here and Here
These pictures are several months old, both dragons are much larger and brigter colors now, but I haven’t bothered to update the pictures, especially since I don’t think I’ll ever get the beardie to pose like that again!!
If you’re looking for exotics, don’t forget to chat up your local shelter. People sometimes surrender odd critters to the SPCA and city and county shelters. Additionally, people abandon snakes and skunks and so on, and they wind up at the shelter. You’ll probably have to be on pretty good terms with the shelter staff before they let you on this, though.
You herp owners should fess up about those horrible hairball-like wad of gunk mess that reptiles sometimes hork up. What a stink! How can a cold-blooded creature produce something so hot and smelly?
tomndebb, I suppose that cattle and goats alike have had problems with both band and blade. Never did any goats, but my experience with former bulls is that banding is trouble free, while chopping sometimes leads to infection. Of course, maybe that’s because they guys who cut are the guys who like a big stainless steel bucket of balls for the fry pan and the get a little careless!
Goat note: In Mexico, goats graze. Perhaps because there aren’t many delicious trees for them… perhaps because they ate the yummy trees before I showed up. All I know is they do nothing but eat grass all day long, even when there are scrubby brush and scrubby trees right there for the taking.
Hmmm. What breed of goat? Nubian? Also, what variety of grass? Grama? Something else?
I’m not doubting you; I’m curious. Not only do our goats pretty much ignore the blue grass and fescue that they stand in, I have also read stories of the goats of Afghanistan (a thousand or more years ago) wiping out the brush covering the ground and contributing to the desertifiction of that country.
Ack, I didn’t realize she was in danger! I know she was very well-behaved and sweet - and her owner seemed like he loved her a lot. But you’re absolutely right, she shouldn’t have been there.
Thanks for the snake info! I may hit you up for more info - unfortunately, SO will more than likely never let me have a snake (I think cats are as far as he’ll go with pets - he’s not as into animals as I am, but who knows, I might convince him one day:). And since we don’t plan on living in VA for the rest of our lives, we could always move to a state that allows snakes:).
tomndebb- I’m sure that some Mexicans have purebred goats. The one I’ve seen, however, were mostly black and thinish- like Nubian but without the giant ears. Despite the heat, these creature have pretty long hair. The grass was, uh, brownish and scraggly. The goats graze in the standard grazing animal nibble-nibble-rip pattern.
Perhaps where conditions support bluegrass, the shrubs are good enough for goats, but in dry and arid places they want the richness of grass. On the other hand, the woman at my co-op has her goats on grass and there is hay in a rack. She might feed them other stuff though - I never asked. I did see a goat in Terlingua, Texas drink beer. Can after can.
About those Afghanistan goats and desertification. I’ve seen this from both sides. There’s a lot of evidence that it wasn’t the goats, it was the goatherds, at least the people. Support for this is, and I’m not arguing, just quoting, first that historical and archeological evidence suggests that the people in that area, like the Anasazi, were using an awful lot of wood and second that goats introduced to Australia do a lot of short-term damage, but haven’t desertified anything all by themselves. I really don’t know.
tomndeb, the snipping I can do myself - I’ve done many, many of those, just not goats. How different can they be from sheep and cattle? Talked to my boyfriend too, and he has a disbudding tool small enough for Oscar, so we’ll get him taken care of this weekend.
He’s really a sweet pet, although it is just a little challenging to get yardwork done with a baby goat right inbetween your legs!
