A caiman. Vicious little git
Oh caiman
My kids’ elementary biology teacher had a zoo in his classroom, all these snakes and lizards and spiders, all sorts of animals, so in the Christmas break he had to farm them out. We got the tarantula once, and once a boa.
Also twice raised abandoned baby squirrels we saw kids walking around with. Like my ex just said “dude, you know how to take care of that?” And the kid shook their head no. Yes, twice. One was Earl, one was Pearl. They were sweet, and very sharp.
One of my kids’ swim coaches had a friend with a pet crow, too. A sailor with a pet crow; in fact a creepy sailor with a pet crow
I am sure you can guess what state I live in.
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…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
Pick one. They are two different species. While caiman are part of the Alligatoridae family, they are not alligators apparently.
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
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.
Let me go back in Time and double check
I worked with some 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 currently have a Tegu 4ft long and sorta harness trained so im that someone for the neighbors im sure 😅
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve kept snails as pets. They are amazing.
Just be glad it wasn’t the immortal snail
My parents had a zebra when I was growing up in Northern California. He was skittish, to the point that this animal lover never got closer than 10 feet until it wound bolt. He brayed at sunrise, easily drowning out the roosters. He sadly ingested part of a mat in his stall which ended up killing him.
After my parents moved once I left home, they got 2 more of these fancy donkeys.
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.
When I was a kid back in the 70’s there was a woman with a spider monkey who lived in the same trailer park as my grandfather. She rode around on a bike with it on her shoulder and would stop when my sister and I were visiting. We were never allowed to pet it, we’d watch while the lady fed it clovers.
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.
Maybe a truffle hunter?
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
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Rule of thumb in my opinion, if you have to perform body modification on an animal, it doesn’t sound like it was ever worth keeping. Clipping bird wings, deforming monkey thumbs, declawing cats, etc. make me cringe bad.
Why the fuck would anyone declaw a cat??? Or the thing with a monkey?
But I don’t entirely agree with you - with some pets you need to cut their balls.
People sadly do all those things. People declaw cats because cat claws can get sharp enough to get into fabric, and the people who declaw their cats either don’t realize cat claws are a part of their fingers or don’t care. People dethumb monkeys because it hinders their ability to weaponize their surroundings, again because all they seem to care about is showing off their pet.
Personally, I would caution against pet castration/neutering/spaying even though it’s not up there with the other things. When it comes to this, you’re just trading some problems for other problems, and it still says a bit about the act of owning them.
I would caution against pet castration/neutering/spaying even though it’s not up there with the other things. When it comes to this, you’re just trading some problems for other problems, and it still says a bit about the act of owning them.
Castration is pretty much a necessity for some pets. Unless you want your house to stink like a crossover between a zoo and a public toilet.
I mean when it’s unnecessary. In many pets it is necessary, but many people do it just because it’s the norm.
When it comes to odor though? I’d cope.
Wtf … wy would you defang tarantulas ⁉️⁉️⁉️
Yeah rip my fangs out id be an asshole as well
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I’m sorry, this makes no sense.
Spiders bite, inject venom and feed through their fangs (Chelicerae). If you remove them the spider won’t be able to bite and more importantly, eat, anymore. So you can’t keep a defanged spider for very long …
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.
