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My nephew has snails. He smuggled them out of the schoolyard in his hoodie after the teachers caught him the first time and confiscated them. My sister found them and had to take them to a pet store to make sure they weren’t dangerous. Now they sit in a nice terrarium and it turns out the hardest part is keeping the humidity up.
I’ve kept snails as pets. They are amazing.
All that over snails? Like were they the kind that might’ve lost their way from the Amazon rainforest?
When you live in Brazil, well…yes.
Just be glad it wasn’t the immortal snail
decoy snails
Met a couple with a pet raccoon, on a leash and everything. I asked them how it was, since my wife had fantasized about a pet raccoon. They described it as a “little mischief goblin”.
We had one get into our trash once. I guess we had thrown out some yogurt that was starting to go bad and this little fucker got yogurty little foot prints all over our front porch. It almost looked intentional how many there were and how spread out it got them. Thankfully we just let our dogs out and they pretty much licked the porch clean lol.
Yuuup. Cute little destructive whirlwinds that can open things. I’ve known a few, “little mischief goblin” is apt.
Omg my dream. We used to have some visit us at my old work and we would feed them grapes and give them a lil bowl to wash their grapes in. They were the cutest.
I worked with someone who lived in South Africa who nursed a couple wild finches back to health. The finches got better but never flew away, and lived in the house. They’d sit on her shoulders during zoom meetings.
I’ve seen someone walking a pig in the forest. Yes, a large pink hairless pig. It was almost like walking a dog, but this animal was quite a bit larger than most dogs.
Removed by mod
That would make sense.
Once I saw a documentary about truffle hunting, and dogs were much better in this regard. Pigs tend to eat everything they find, whereas dogs will obediently restrain themselves and only point to the truffle instead of eating it.
One of my neighbors has a pig that’s so beloved by the local community he has shirts. I have one. They have an African grey parrot too.
Pigs can ear humans if they get hungry enough
I knew someone who dealt in exotic animals and they came to work with a baby caiman alligator in a Tupperware because they were selling it after work
Was it well behaved?
- caiman
- alligator
These are two different species. While caiman are part of the Alligatoridae family, they are not alligators apparently.
Caimans are distinguished from alligators…
Source:Wikipedia
Let me go back in Time and double check
Alligator is the common name for the family and also the common name of a few specific species. It’s kind of like how all tortoises are turtles, but not all turtles are tortoises. All caiman are alligators, but not all alligators are caimans.
From Wikipedia
Caiman is an alligatorid belonging to the subfamily Caimaninae, one of two primary lineages within the Alligatoridae family, the other being alligators
Alligatorinae is a subfamily within the family Alligatoridae that contains the alligators and their closest extinct relatives, and is the sister taxon to Caimaninae
Alligators and caimans split about 53-65 million years ago
Alligatoridae contains eight living species: two alligators within Alligatorinae, and the six caimans of Caimaninae
The true alligators are today represented by two species
…the subfamily Caimaninae, which differ from the alligator…
Technically they are Alligatoridae, but when people refer to “Alligators” they mean the Genus: Alligatorinae. This would be like saying that the Caimans and Alligators are both Crocodiles because they come from the Order: Crocodilia.
I understand that common names getting mixed use in families, genus, and species can be confusing, but you’re being willfully obtuse here just to double down on useless pedantry.
Not my fault it says “Alligator and Caiman” not Alligators including Caiman. I’m just a guy reading Wikipedia.
Reading is about more than reciting facts and quoting sources. Sure, you can read, but you have utterly failed to comprehend the context or the article or the actual substance of my comments.
Ok
This isn’t that exotic I guess but I had a customer at the restaurant that would smuggle in his pet rat (I worked the graveyard so usually nobody was around). Its name was Gizmo and it would sit on his shoulder under his sweater and he would feed it French toast. Sweetest little thing.
Did it also use its owner as a marionette to cook linguini?
I live in California. Pretty much all the cool pets are illegal here.
That being said I knew a guy who had a raccoon and several ferrets. Their house smelled awful but once you were there for awhile you kinda stopped smelling it and the raccoon and ferrets were adorable together.
I had a ferret in my 20s. Little dude bathed at least once a week and still smelled. Was (almost) litter trained and could bend in half, spastically hopping around like a little smelly crackhead
Yeah they stink no matter what. You can get their stinky gland removed but I’m still not sure if that’s good for them or not. Idk. I’m not a veterinarian and they are super illegal here so it’s not really something I am concerned about at this present moment haha.
Heard about the gland thing, and definitely not into it, but he had just an overall musky smell. Not like he sprayed or anything. We went to beach a lot and he’d hang out under umbrella shade and flirt with the girls.
Yeah the smell is strong and odd but it’s not outright bad. Just a bit weird until you get used it.
saw someone with a big ass snake.
Also, I owned a hedgehog once, dude had some serious trauma from his 5 previous owners. Yeah, 5.
He was always angry, but I still played with him anyways trying to get him to warm up to people. Never did, but he did like exploring all the books and crannies of the room. Wish I could’ve had him before all his previous owners :(ass snake
Oh man, those are the worst!
They need to regulate ownership better if he went through five bad owners, like was the person managing those transactions Dr. Eggman?
I’m friends with one guy who’s got an axolotl and another who’s got one of those African grey parrots. Both really cool animals. Also knew a kid back in school that had a pet squirrel.
Half dog, half wolf hybrid. That thing made a Great Dane look small. I mean, his head was slightly lower than mine at 5’8”. I could’ve easily ridden him. Beautiful animal. Wish I had a picture.
My aunt worked as a zoo vet, and was one of the people animal control would call if they found an exotic animal and didn’t know what to do with it. As a result I grew up being able to casually play with several different species of monkeys, as well as an asshole African grey parrot. When I was in high school she even fostered a serval cat for a short time till they could find a more permanent facility.
I too want to to know about the asshole African grey parrot
He was old, and didn’t have an easy life before being rescued. I don’t blame him, but it was kind of funny that his standard response was “fuck you”.
Oh no, what did the parrot do?
Cheated at cards.
I currently have a Tegu 4ft long and sorta harness trained so im that someone for the neighbors im sure 😅
When I was a kid, 7-8 years old kinda thing, there was an older guy (maybe 13) who had a pet hawk.
He’d walk around the neighbourhood with the hawk perched on his leather-bound wrist, chained somehow.
That’s all I recall; don’t know who, what, or how. Saw it 3 or 4 times over the course of a year or two…My bestie has an iguana. Not that exotic in the grand scheme of things, even if pretty cool.
So I’m also internet acquainted with a guy that cares for tiger cubs. Except the big kitties aren’t his, he just works at a zoo.
There’s a guy on Instagram who has two absolutely massive pythons, like 16 feet long and thick as tires. They drape themselves across his young daughter very casually, and she spends time playing Barbies with the big one. The owner is very educated about snakes and obviously takes very good care of them, and isn’t some trash person who just wants violent animals, but much like pit bulls all it takes is one wrong turn and that child could die in a terrible way. I know some pet snakes are very docile, but something that could take it into its head to strangle me for dinner is not a pet to me.
People’s pit bull apologia is bad enough, we had a person in my ER one night who had been walking their friend’s pit bull who they walked often, who yanked the leash when he saw another dog, and when they tried to grip it the dog turned around and began mauling them, and ripped their arm right off. Someone called 911 and the cops showed up and had to shoot the dog and kill it to get it off them, and they took both them and the arm to our hospital but couldn’t save it. My niece is also missing part of her lip because of a pit bull. Those are exotic animals that are extremely dangerous to me, fuck that nanny dog bullshit.
More importantly, with a pitbull it’s mostly about training and handling. But snakes - even the intelligent ones - are very different from dogs. They are way more controlled by instinct and are natural predators of monkeys and young great apes. They are not intelligent in the same way mammals are, their internal machinery can at any point in time simply click with the wrong situation and that toddler is gone.
They do look benign and just curious with the child, I won’t be unfair, and he’s really well versed in their care. I don’t want to make him sound bad or anything, he’s really a nice guy and I’ve asked him some questions he has good answers for. But who wants to run that risk? Those kids in Nova Scotia who died because a pet python escaped its enclosure and climbed into the air vent, fell through the ceiling because it was 100 pounds,and reacted to the screaming kids it fell on top of? That’s terrifying.
