Growing up, my family had several unconventional pets, as well as plenty of conventional pets with unusual tendencies. There was the dog that loved (or hated) fireworks – so much so that she would bite fountains, artillery shell tubes and more as they sat with fuses sparking and send flaming, colorful bursts into the crowd.
This same dog nursed a litter of kittens, including a cat we called “Fido” – who had his own identity issues.
My brother’s turtle was afraid of mice. At least, that’s what a first glance at a strange situation suggested. The turtle lived in a large plastic tote for much of its life, and my brother once went upstairs to his room to find the turtle slowly trudging across the floor … with a mouse in the tote. We finally concluded the cat must have temporarily tipped over the tote chasing a mouse, at which point the turtle fell out and the mouse stayed in? We still really aren’t sure what happened.
And I can’t forget Louie, my mom’s Doberman pinscher. Well, actually, I barely remember Louie – he was around when I was very young, but the stories of his prancing through the woods after butterflies are favorites in our family.
As far as unconventional pets, we had our share: wild snakes, lizards, raccoons, a cooler full of crawdads, and the occasional jar housing a hideously gigantic spider or batch of tadpoles.
My dad, who loves reptiles, amphibians, weird insects and general mischief, acquired most of our strange pets. If there was an Igloo cooler sitting on the table, we could just about guarantee dad caught some kind of critter and brought it home with him. Peeking inside had the potential to be a terrifying experience – you didn’t know if you were going to find a harmless horny toad or an aggressive arachnid.
Most of the time, it was a snake – bull snakes, blue racers, hog-nosed, you name it.
We were never seriously injured, and dad always released them back into the wild.
We also owned a few pet coons over the years, and the saying’s true, at least in our experience – they all go crazy (read: revert back to their wild ways) after a certain amount of time. They can be pretty friendly and entertaining before that happens, though.
We raised the last coon we had from infancy, feeding it with a bottle and everything. My brother shot its mother in my grandma’s chicken house, not aware, at first, it had a litter of hungry babies. Mom gave the siblings away, but we got to keep one, and we had fun while it lasted.
My parents have a large barn with a makeshift basketball court in the loft. The coon lived in the loft and would run up and playfully wrap itself around your leg when you climbed the ladder.
I didn’t tell my friend, Courtney, this, and suggested we go play basketball in the barn. She climbed the ladder first and nearly fainted when the coon came running at her.
Eventually, he started hissing at us when we tried to hold him and disappeared in the trees.
Crazier than a pet coon.
