ok, i’ve discovered how to obtain quasi-immortality around here–establish a new thread. [hey! HEY! i said immorTALity. ]
so i thought this one should be good for another round of monitor-spray-inducing posts. what’s the strangest critter you (or personal acquaintance) has had as a pet? OR… what is the strangest means by which you’ve acquired a pet (mundane or not)? i’d prefer that the pets actually fall into the “live” category (i.e., no rocks, sticks, or other inanimate objects need apply).
hmmm. come to think of it, “strange” as applied to pet could either mean the critter itself was outside the norm for regular pet-hood, or that the cat/dog/iguana/whatever was more than a little weird in its own right. hell with it–i’ll accept either definition. the more the merrier!
i’ll lead off. while at college, i adopted the tarantula’s dinner. well, ok, maybe it was supposed to be lunch. whatever.
just as a little perspective, i’m a pretty rabid arachnaphobe. i don’t like even looking at the dreadful crawly things for too long, much less getting up close and personal when they’re present. but i happened to cruise the back of the biology classroom one day, and discovered a covered aquarium-type display containing not only a large hairy tarantula, but also a small, live white rodent who was obviously intended to make its acquaintance on a much more personal level. i’m not an enormous fan of mice and rats, but they’re orders-of-magnitude higher on my list of acceptable livestock when compared to spiders. so i actually put my hand into that container {GACK!!} and took the young rat out. [thank GOD the tarantula seemed pretty zzz-d out at the time.] personally, i didn’t care whether or not the damn multi-legged horror starved or not; i just didn’t think the rat deserved it. i don’t know if Ben (yeah, i know–how original :rolleyes: ) understood that he was being saved from a rather grisly end or not, but he seemed quite content with staying either in my purse or on my shoulder for the rest of the school day. he wound up with his own Habitrail™ house, complete with the little penthouse perch, and a plastic ball you could put him in so he could roam around the house. (i wasn’t going to push it too far to see if either he would always come back to me, or if the cat was really all THAT domesticated.)
unfortunately, his decision to revert to a nocturnal cycle started to interfer with my need for sleep to survive school, so he went to a new home and a young boy who seemed very pleased to adopt him. happy endings all around (except for the spider. i have no idea what happened to him. i don’t care, either.)
When I was in second grade, I had a pet mosquito larva, named Sam. When he died (he never made it to full skeeter-hood, sadly), I buried him in a pill bottle near the school’s WWI monument.
My mother, the teacher, decided to give me a lesson on how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. Pulled a Dill Caterpillar off the dill plant, stuck him in a jar with some sand, a stick, a lot of dill, and some water. Every day, I checked on him, and expressed horror when he started spinning his crysilis. My mom reassured me that he just going to be sleeping, and then he’d be a butterfly. In two weeks, the caterpillar was gone, and there was a butterfly in the jar! I screamed for my mom, we hurriedly got the jar outside and opened it, and off he flew! And I burst into tears.
Being the son of a (now retired) Biology teacher, what WASNT an unusual pet?
One of my dads students brought him an egg he found one day. A large egg. We spent a long time looking it up and finally found out what it was. It was a Turkey Vulture egg. A gleem hit both of our eyes and we immediatly tried to incubate it. We incubated it and it actually started to hatch, now, I guess we arn’t the most proficient in vulture husbandry because it died while hatching out. It was a sad thing. We always comment on how cool it would have been to have an Adult vulture on your fireplace mantle staring down at everyone. Just dont fall asleep in the livingroom!
Other then that, I used to breed snakes. For 12 years I kept reptiles of every variety, nothing too unusual in the way of herpetology circles though. The rarest is probably a Philipean Sailfin lizard. My favorite was a Bearded Dragon.
My cat has ten toes on EACH front foot. (it’s quite odd looking actually) I think it qualifies as an odd pet. In fact every time I count his toes, he seems to have another one. I have stopped counting because it freaks me out a bit to keep finding extra toes (most of the extra ones are really tiny). His back feet have the normal number of toes. When I adopted him from the shelter, I picked him because he was a cool cat, and had extra toes (I thought he only had one extra, but I got lucky)
I’m not sure if strictly speaking this counts as strange, but what the hell.
A co-worker of mine owned an iguana named Cuddles. One day he comes home from school to discover that Cuddles is acting really strangly (having met Cuddles personally, I’m not sure how he could tell any difference).
The thing would climb up a chair, position himself, tense up, violently hurl himself at the screen door, bounce off the taut screen like a trampolene, land on his back like a sack of potatoes, then he’d right himself and do the whole thing all over again.
He watched this happen at least five times before he decided he should interviene.
Turns out Cuddles had snuck into his brothers room and eaten a rather healthy marajuana plant that they’d been growing in a coffee can.
Cuddles was never quite the same lizard after that.
I visited China a few years ago. One of the foods offered to me was a moth in its cocoon. Naturally, this wasn’t very appetizing, but I kept an uncooked cocoon to play with, and I (probably illegally) brought it home with me. A few weeks later, maybe because of warm indoor heating, the cocoon started jumping around and soon a really freakin big moth emerged. I kept it in a net-covered ice cream bucket for a few days, while it laid some eggs and died.
Worked in an exotic pet store as a lad, and was never at all impressed with the smaller birds. Parrots had personality, but the Budgies and Cockatiels seemed idiotic and uninteresting. Flash forward a few years and I’m showering in my upstairs studio apartment. I hear the continued loud cry of a small bird as I turn off the water. Don’t ask me why but I thought to myself:
‘If it isn’t on my doorstep I’m not going to get involved.’
I opened my door and there stood an adolescent cockatiel giving me the fisheye. He/She (I never got it sexed) decided to hop on in. From that day forward Icky (Icarus - for the distinct lack of flying skills) was my shadow - loved to sit on my head, often resting on my shoulder near my neck. Icky followed me into the shower even. A few months later as I was outside my apartment walking the Cockatiel (not a euphemism) Icky managed to fly to the top of a tall tree. That was the last day Icky followed me.
Icky, wherever you are, you taught me not to judge a bird on its size.
HIJACK!!!
In China, they also eat fertilized eggs, complete with well developed chicken fetus (fetus? embryo?) YAK!
My cat Polly has 7 toes on each front foot and six on each back one. Her kittens had some of those tiny,funny toes, which the vet removed at 2 days old. He said they could catch and rip…EWWW. Half of them had extra toes, isn’t genetics wonderful?
While it may sound mundane at first…my sister and I adopted a stray cat while walking past some apartments at the top of our road. Now this next part is in no way supposed to be racist…please don’t attack me. It is just something we noticed the cat doing.
She growled at dark skinned people. The apartments we got her from had a large hispanic population, and the only conclusion we could draw was that she had been mistreated by hispanic owners or others in the apartment complex, and therefore learned to avoid dark-skinned people as a defense mechanism.
Kinda like my professor’s dog that she adopted from a shelter. He is wary around men, especially tall men. My prof has the suspicion that he had been abused by a previous male owner.
Oh, and my parents have a fishtank full of albino trout. Before you get edgy, my dad works at a fish hatchery, and rather than watch the albinos get picked off by birds (they have a very low survival rate, and pretty much never live long enough to return to spawn) he saves them and makes them our family pets.
When my oldest dog was a puppy (about 6 months) he heard a cat outside “crying”. He would not shut up until I checked on her. She was starving so I gave her some of his puppy chow and his water which was alright with him. The next thing I know, I’m taking her to the vet and she’s moved in with us. She only lived a little over a year after that. She died from a liver problem, possibly cancer.
Before the cat died, a full grown chow and lab-mix puppy started hanging around our yard. My dog would let them come in and eat his food. Believe me, he is protective of the yard so it was the weirdest thing I’d ever seen. The chow was very shy and would run away if I even opened the back door. But the puppy would stay. I started looking for a home for her. I thought I found one so I took her in while the family prepared a fenced yard for her. Then they changed their minds, so of course, I kept the dog. She’s so sweet. I never minded having her anyway.
Actually, he adopted two other puppies before the other one. They were together and very immature. By the time I was able to catch them, one of them was so sick, I just had my husband take them into the Humane Society. I couldn’t take care of 3 dogs anyway.
Strange pets, you say? I’ve got a few that fit the bill.
Under unusual pets:
First was a pet crow my dad had, named Tex. He raised it from a baby, and taught it to talk a little. It was mean. That crow lived to be 22 years old.
Second was a blue jay, appropriately named Jay Jay. Found him young in the yard - don’t remember now how. Since dad had a crow and knew something about raising birds, we kept him. He lived for about 5 yrs.
Third was another pet blue jay, this one named Blue. He fell out of his nest as a fledgling, and the nest was full enough. Believing that bit about birds rejecting babies with human smell, and having had one before, we adopted him. Around that time, one of dad’s college students asked him about when to take a crow from it’s nest to raise as a pet, so we acquired a baby crow as well. Named it Joe. (Baby crow was very ugly.) Joe and Blue were raised together, but after becoming adults we kept them apart. Blue had a cage inside, Joe outside. It was funny to hear the blue jay sound like a distant crow, and Joe sound like an extra large blue jay. Joe finally got sick one summer and died. But Blue… after 11 years, mom found a lonely old man and got him to adopt the bird, and last I heard the bird was alive and kicking at 13 years.
Under pets that are strange:
My brother had an English setter that was too hyper for his own good. We didn’t have a big enough yard for him, either. We finally did find him another home in the country.
Have a siamese cat that’s 19 years old and not quite dead. Her strange behavior when young included getting nervous any time people packed for trips and climbing into their suitcases. Also getting snooty when my sister would return, and “ignore” her, walking around being seen but not responding. After she got older, she started another “interesting” trait. She brings socks like dead animals. She goes to my dad’s dresser and removes the clean pairs of socks and carries them into the other room like a gift, meowing like she’s brought a dead animal. If you don’t respond, she’ll do it again. She has emptied the drawer before. She’s also done it from clothes baskets. Then there was the time she paraded through the living room carrying a pair of underwear, and we had company.
I once had a small venomous snake (a * masterii drysdalia * native to southern Australia) in an aquarium for about 2 months. It was given to me by a workmate when he went on holidays. Unfortunately, the snake never got warm enough in the aquarium to do anything other than sleep all the time. I even tried putting very small lizards in the tank for the snake to catch and eat (within the snake’s normal diet in the wild) but they died of starvation not snakebite. Eventually I let the snake go in nearby bushland.
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