Strangest pets?

Sure, when most people think of pets they think of cats and dogs. However, there's a whole range of animal companions out there waiting to enter our lives and make them miser- I mean happy.

What's the strangest creature in the role of pet that you've owned?

(I'll tell a short tale about my newts when there's been a few posts.)

[ms_n]

My daughter owned a string of hermit crabs. The first one was the bestest! He was sooooooo cute! I loved watching his little eyes peep out of his shell, then to hear the little clinking of his claws on the counter, and to watch him speed across the rug.

He would cleverly escape from his sandbox made in a soda box.
We had to be careful about where those sandhills were! Hermie, as my daughter called him, didn't pinch when held. He peered at you with a detectable sweetness in his gaze.

I cried when he died. I heard a clink, looked over at him, and there he was all sprawled out on his green plate playpen. I still miss that hermit crab. The next two could never replace him. He really was special.

The hermit crab as a pet phase ended because mommy didn't want any more little crabs lost after play time. They love to hide as they are hermit crabs... We found one about a month later under the couch cushion. Oh, poor crabs who suffered an untimely demise!

A few candidates for strange... okay, so they're not so strange.

Guinea Pig... don't touch the Guinea Pig... don't bother the Guinea Pig... don't make the Guinea Pig swing on the monkey swing... what's the point of having a pet if you can't bond with it or learn its behaviors and such? It spent a lot of time in its cage, just eating and crapping until it eventually cut itself chile escaping and bled to death in a closet. Why did it escape? Because it was living in a monkey cage with large spring-covered gaps for the food and water dishes. If I were a Guinea Pig stuck living in a monkey cage with a monkey swing, I'd run, too. Why a monkey cage? My grandfather had a monkey in his dry cleanign store until it bit a customer... "We don't monkey with your dry cleaning" was the advertising gag. He eventually changed to a monkey toy on a wire above the entryway, rolling back and forth.

Siamese Fighting Fish... my Dad kept them in the den in two separate small bowls. These fish must have been bored out of their minds now that I look back at it. I eventually freed one with a spoon in the kitchen, then went nuts screaming when I did, got paddled with a sandal when the fish was returned safely to its glass jar. I remember thinking of Simon bar Sinister during this... why?

Hermit Crab... we had one, too, but I have no idea where it was kept. All I remember is my brother shouting that it was gone, everybody looking, and it was found somewhere in a cabinet in the bathroom, dead. That would have eben neat to watch, but I never knew where it was.

Newts... we had a pair of newts when I was 11 or so. We kept them in a glass terrarium without a lid and put a flat collander on top... or was it a cheese grater. One got out, got caught, brought back, and then promptly eaten by the other. Yet another example of not getting the right equipment and countainers for pets.

[kurt_messick]

I have a friend who keeps ferrets. They interact fairly well with the cat (one of my cat's kittens). They have to be caged most of the time, but seem to have learned to get the cat to help them pop the latch on the cage. That is teamwork.

[hadassahchana[$]]

I want a bunny. So do the kids. Many people have told me that rabbits can easily be trained to use a litterbox.

Does anyone have any experience with house rabbits?

Cindy

[kurt_messick]

My sister had a rabbit, named 'Waskly'.

It never did get 'housetrained' -- it was kept in a hutch next to the house. We only had it about a year (we moved so often, and all but the 'main pet' always went to new homes before we'd leave).

But it was cuddly, cute, and we loved it. We had a dog at the same time, and they chased each other around the house (okay, so the dog did more chasing, but the rabbit didn't really run out of fear).

[mtbat]

Originally posted by hadassahchana
I want a bunny. So do the kids. Many people have told me that rabbits can easily be trained to use a litterbox.

Does anyone have any experience with house rabbits?

Cindy

Bunnies can make great house pets-they can be trained to use a litterbox-let me ask my mom for specifics K? she had this one long eared rabbit named Mushroom who was a doll-she thought she was a cat.

[mtbat]

Originally posted by file13
[b]A few candidates for strange... okay, so they're not so strange.

Guinea Pig... don't touch the Guinea Pig... don't bother the Guinea Pig... don't make the Guinea Pig swing on the monkey swing... what's the point of having a pet if you can't bond with it or learn its behaviors and such? It spent a lot of time in its cage, just eating and crapping until it eventually cut itself chile escaping and bled to death in a closet. Why did it escape? Because it was living in a monkey cage with large spring-covered gaps for the food and water dishes. If I were a Guinea Pig stuck living in a monkey cage with a monkey swing, I'd run, too. Why a monkey cage? My grandfather had a monkey in his dry cleanign store until it bit a customer... "We don't monkey with your dry cleaning" was the advertising gag. He eventually changed to a monkey toy on a wire above the entryway, rolling back and forth.

In Peru they eat Guinea Pigs-they skin and gut them then deep fry them whole.

Oh yeah my strangest pet-we have a fighting fish that plays dead-he just floats at either the top or the bottom of the bowl. I've shaken the bowl a few times just to make sure

Fridai

[taurusmoon]

Do not, I repeat, do not get a rabbit and keep it as in indoor pet. We had one for a number of years. While she was adorable, she was also very messy, smelly and noisy.

Rabbit urine is extremely strong. Not only is the smell awful, but it can eat through finishes on furniture. Then there are the rabbit "pellets" that manage to drop out of the cage and wind up everywhere.

Plus, though they don't vocalize, rabbits thump when agitated. Cage rattling thumps are not pleasant during the night.

And, both their teeth and their nails need a great deal of attention lest they grow too long. They tend to take care of the tooth part by chewing. On everything in sight. The nails need constant trimming or, gentle as they might be, rabbits can and will unintentionally maul you to death.

If you'll be keeping the rabbit outdoors that's another story. But then, make sure you get it young and handle it often. An older animal that is not used to human interaction will be very skittish.

Sara
The voice of experience

[cyndilouwhoo]

I have had a number of "strange pets" in my life...

Unfortunately all of them have been cats.

There's Jane (the shoe-peeing cat), the world's first indoor feral cat.

Her mother and dad were one of the many wild cats on Fire Island--but the mom was trapped and brought into the house to give birth. Jane was born in the house, had never in her life been outside until we moved out of the city--but she behaves exactly like a feral animal. We had to rent a have-a-heart trap to get her to leave our apartment in Cambridge.

It took me almost 2 years to get her to trust me enough to let me touch her.

Then there's TJ, the cat with chronic "romantic designs" toward my husband .

Any time he enters a room she drops to the floor and rolls provocatively onto her back. My husband thinks it's hilarious. I think it's really disgusting.

She also has a sock fetish. She likes to get into the laundryroom and carry socks all over the house. I often wonder if she is mourning the loss of a litter of kittens. She cries over any dirty sock she can find.

I think somehow that the sock thing is connected to her "love that dare not speak its name" toward my husband. I think she thinks that he can solve her parenting problem for her.

Eeeeeeeuuuuwwwww. :p

Then there was Reginald--the vampire cat. I think he was taken from his mother too early. He would suck on just about any article of clothing he could find.

He also loved to suck on my neck. It was far easier to blame my ex-husband for the hickies (yes the cat occasionally left marks on my neck) than to endure the strange looks I'd get if I told the real truth about how the marks actually got there.

Yes indeed, I have had some strange pets...

Cyndi

The cat lady, who also happens to be owned by 2 dogs.

[emeleel]

My mom always had aspirations of being a farmer. When I was little and we lived in the city, at one point we had two geese. Those met their demise when they curiously stuck their head through the chain link fence into the neighbor's yard - and the neighbor had 2 or 3 large, ferocious German Shepards (one of whom was named "Killer") who decided that Goose Head made a tasty snack. You may all go "EWWWWWW!" right here.

Then we had a female duck and a mallard drake. Ducky was so cute, laying eggs and sitting on them. I forget the drake's name, but he was sooo beautiful with those shiny, iridescent feathers on his head. He met his match with a local dog, too. I forget what happened to Ducky.

Then we moved to the country. We promptly got a henhouse full of chickens. Our first rooster was a Rhode Island Red who like to drop one wing down on the ground and then run full-tilt at someone like he was going to attack them. If you stood your ground however, he would stop a couple of feet away from you and just walk off. You just see him going "Shrug. Okay, whatever". None of the rest of the chickens were "pets" though. Most of them eventually met their demise thanks to stray dogs.

Then we got goats. First we had a nanny goat who eventually ran away. I imagine she lived the rest of her life in the woods with the deer. Then we got a billy and two nannies. The nannies were actually mother and daughter. The daughter eventually had two babies of her own, two little boy kids, and they were soooo adorable. They were my pets, big time. I named them Christopher Columbus and Marco Polo because they were so adventurous. I bottle-fed them and loved them like crazy. I was inconsolable when they got old enough they had to be sold. I think we sold the oldest nanny, but the younger one (the mother of the boys) met her demise thanks to stray dogs.

We did have a rabbit for a while. He was black and I named him Buck Rogers. He met his demise by escaping from the hutch and for a while we thought he'd simply run away. But a couple of weeks later, a funky smell started wafting through the house. My dad went under the crawl space and figured out what it was. We had a concrete block house - and Buck had gone under there, tried to go through one of the block holes and gotten stuck. You may now say "EWWWWWW!" again.

You get the idea that I don't have a lot of luck with animals? That's why my current cat is an indoor only cat. I've had many cats over the years, and they've all met untimely demises because of outdoor dangers - or they just ran away. I got tired of it.

[sylvanb]

The oddest "pets" I've had were in a home-grown salt-water aquarium. I filled it up with water, sand, and rocks from the Rhode Island beaches, and went beach combing and tide-pooling to keep it occupied. Most critters didn't last long, as they all tend to eat each other, but it was a constant source of discovery and entertainment.

Two guys lasted long enough to get names: a whelk, named Lawrence (get it? ) and a mud crab whose name I forget. He was a gorgeous array of shells, pebbles, and seaweed sprigs which he glued onto himself for camouflage. Sea stars are fun to watch, but nothing else lives long in their presence. Same with crabs, and anything else of any size. Hermit crabs are smaller, less aggressive, and endlessly fascinating. Too cute.

A friend who worked in a lab liberated an unused binocular microscope for me, and this multiplied the pleasure. If you had any idea what is in that water you'd never go swimming again. It is teeming with the most bizarre little creatures. After my tide pool sessions, I would put a sprig of seaweed into a petri dish with some sea water, and spend hours poking around to look at the absolutely amazing things clinging to the fronds and pulsing through the water.

If you think barnacles are dead and boring, look at them through a microscope -- they fish by waving delicate little fans. Tube worms also have beautiful little fans. Hydroids are one stage of a bizarre reproductive sequence; they look like translucent little trees. A clump of mussels (yawn, right?) contains babies the size of a pin-head, which crawl around looking for a place to send out their threads and settle down. Mussels move by extruding a truly obscene-looking foot. Speaking of obscene, slipper shells (Crepidula fornicata) live in stacks. While all start as males, those that begin a stack change to female while those on top will most often be male--unless there is a shortage of females. Got that? Once in a while I would find some tiny sea anemones, or a comb jelly (irridescent and incredibly lovely), but these were always the first things to become somebody's dinner.

This avocation grew out of a longing to reconnect with my unfulfilled childhood fascination with tide pools (I grew up in California), and sustained me through a difficult and lonely phase of my grown-up life.

[lynnzop[$]]

When we moved to this house in 1999, we inherited a goat (Jake) and pig (Miss Piggy) from the former owner.

Jake is a neutered male goat who is wider than he is tall. He looks perpetually pregnant. He is very shy and runs away from anyone but our family. It's pretty funny to come home and see him just wandering around the yard or pasture with the horses.

Miss Piggy is a pot-bellied pig who is the size of a large coffee table. She snores. LOUD. She is also decidedly female in her mood swings - one day she will get p'd off, tear apart the barn and jump on the garbage can, and the next she will be at the back door calmly begging to be petted. We have pictures of Jeremy riding her in the back yard.

Other than that, we've pretty much run the normal dogs, cats, horses, chickens, ducks (Melanie, we had one duck who spent her life with 1/2 a bill because our Dalmation decided that it would taste good. Duck bills BLEED like a son, by the way.), fish, frogs and turtles. At least that's all I can remember! With kids, you tend to "adopt" whatever is crawling around the yard at the time.

Lynn
(Who should post a picture of the pig and the goat just for kicks.)

[lambchops]

Let's see...

My parent's wiener dog Annie is stange. Actually, she's OCD. She shook a rope bone (hitting either side of her head) repeatedly until she gave herself a brain injury. As per what the vet says the cause of her epilepsy is anyway. she's on both phenobarbitol and valium not to calm her down. In addition, we had to take all of her toys away. She used to shove them under couches and chairs and bark for hours at them. A VERY interesting dog.

My cat, Max, is also strange. He's what I call a dull light. You look at the poor guy and there's nothing going on behind his eyes. One time we brought him to my in-laws. He disappeared for days, and when we discovered him he was hiding in the footing of the house (which he'd accessed via the basement). What else...he doesn't land on his feel, can't figure out how to jump, is just strange.

[emeleel]

I completely forgot about our other "farm" animal, Dottie The Barking Pig! We also had a pig, a pretty pink sow named Dottie. She was in a pen up on the hill. Our dog liked to go up there and "play" with Dottie - they would race each other, up and down the fence, each on their own side. The dog would bark at the pig, having fun, and eventually the pig learned to bark just like the dog. It was too, too funny!

I also had a runt pig named Maggie for a short time, but unlike runts of literature and cinema, this one was actually sickly and didn't make it.

When I was real little, about 5 or 6, I had a baby squirrel for a time, but he didn't make it either. He was either sick or we didn't know enough about taking care of him - I suspect the latter.

[TheUnknown285]

Originally posted by lambchops

My cat, Max, is also strange. He's what I call a dull light. You look at the poor guy and there's nothing going on behind his eyes. What else...he doesn't land on his feel, can't figure out how to jump, is just strange.

Your cat sounds like that cat from Pet Sematary, Winston Churchill.

[cyndilouwhoo]

I am glad this floated back up to the top of the pile.

I forgot about my sister-in-law's "pets".

She keeps an aquarium full of hissing cockroaches.

Wanna know what it's like to feel your skin crawl?

Stand alone in a room with an aquarium full of roaches.

Euwwwwwwwww....

They look like they are plotting the downfall of the free world.

Cyndi

Who wonders why anyone would pay good money for something they could probably catch in an apartment for free.

Euwww, Euwww, Euwwww!!!

[hadassahchana[$]]

Cockroaches? That's just wrong! "Ew!" doesn't even come close.


Cindy

[sweetndnhoney]

Does my kids count???



Discover Wildlife.....Have Kids!!

[rich2003dm]

I've got two teens. We have a (large) dog now, but we went through a succession of pets...goldfish, hermit crabs, parakeets, and a pair of anoles (little green lizards).

The anoles were kind of fun. They would only eat live worms. And they'd swallow them whole. I spent many a lunch hour prowling the Manhattan petshops for worms to feed the damned things.

When we bought them, the pet shop lady warned us that they don't do well in captivity and would probably only live for six to eight weeks. Damned worm-eating monsters lived a year and a half.

Those little guys were always escaping when it was time to clean the tank we kept them in. Spent the good part of that year and a half chasing them around the house.

Never again.

Rich

[pluckyduck]

My strangest pet didn't seem strange to me .... a reticulated python (named "Monty", what else?)...but I found out how many people are afraid of snakes.

He was a little, tiny baby python, but I had people who wouldn't come into my house, just because he was in a corner in a glass aquarium. Snake phobia is alive and well and much more widespread than I had thought.

Monty didn't last long, I'm sorry to say. I cried and cried when he died in my arms (literally). He'd been getting sick, I could tell, but I didn't have anyone to take him to. He stopped eating his mice and the vets in my area didn't "do" snakes.

Other than that, Greg and I had a huge tank of South American cichlids...aggressive fish. We used to have to feed them live food. I loved that. I was squeamish about feeding them feeder goldfish in the beginning, but there is something beautiful about the food chain.

Now, I have a poodle.

Andrea

[cyndilouwhoo]

Originally posted by pluckyduck
Monty didn't last long, I'm sorry to say. I cried and cried when he died in my arms (literally). He'd been getting sick, I could tell, but I didn't have anyone to take him to. He stopped eating his mice and the vets in my area didn't "do" snakes.
Andrea

Oh Andrea, that's so sad. Next time you get an exotic (and I am sure you will--once an exotic lover, always an exotic lover I have discovered) let me know. My sister-in-law is a vet pathologist at Penn. I am sure she could take a peek--or if it's too far, give me the name of someone in your area.

Cyndi

Who would like to point out that her sister-in-law is the owner of the hissing cockroaches. Euwwwww!