When we were kids, we had a pet alligator for a short while (actually a kaiman? caiman? is what it actually was) until it got too big to live in the small fish tank it was in and would get out. Now that I think about it, I have no idea what happened to it or how my parents got rid of it. I don't think I want to know. It never had a name and I was never particularly attached to it. Repitiles are not my thing.
We would also collect tadpoles from the local pond when young and put them in a fish tank. When they would get their back legs, they would jump out of the tank and you would find them dead on the kitchen floor the next morning. I think they eventually got released back into the wild.
We had baby chicks one Easter. As they got older, they were given to a local farmer.
We also had three ducks which were eventually given to the Cincinnati Zoo. I think we got them in memory of Pecky, which was a duck we had in Pennsylvania when I was very young. Years after we had moved away, we heard from the people who had taken Pecky that he had died, defending his family from a marauding racoon.
We also at various times have had parakeets that my mother mostly kept in her kindergarten class. Tarzan (there was a Jane) was a very good dice-thrower.
The Lovely Wife had finches for awhile, starting out with Applegate and Lola...and then a series of wives for Applegate after Lola bit the dust. The last of his wives..an awful shrew...died in an earthquake from shock. We didn't mourn her...she was an a "filthy, disgusting bird." It was the only damage we had in the earthquake. Applegate got out of his cage one day and Humbug, our cocker at the time, got him in her mouth. Though I manage to extricate him, he died moments later, either of shock or a puncture wound.
Those were our exotic pets...you've heard all about the various dogs...Hotspur, Humbug, Cully, and Tewkesbury...in the past and, of course, the cat, Mosby the Grey Ghost.
