Hobbies: Unloading the Ark

In Chicago, a day laborer walked into a pet shop and walked out with a black bear. A store in suburban Seattle is advertising a special on baby elephants (two for $9,998 and one free). A terrified Boston girl bought a five-foot indigo snake as a wedding gift for her fiance. Hunter Nick Del Duca, in Canyon City, Colo., has orders for six Colorado mountain lion cubs at $150 apiece, and can sell as many more as he can catch.

All over the U.S., pet lovers are buying what the trade calls “exotics.” Rover, Tabby and Budgie are as popular as ever, but they are being crowded by Huggy the boa constrictor, Beaky the vulture, Stinger the scorpion and many other creepy, crawly, slinky, slithery creatures that once belonged in zoos.

Party Stopper. “When I first got in this business ten years ago,” says Pet Shop Owner Gene Herman of Evergreen, Ore., “if you sold a monkey a month and a talking myna bird once in a while, it was way out. Now you’ve got to be able to provide everything from a python to a piranha on a day’s notice.” Squirrel monkeys, owl monkeys, woolly monkeys and others have become so popular that they are hardly classified as exotic any more. Among other species in demand are such far-out fauna as anteaters (they prefer bananas), wolves, wild pigs, electric eels, baby crocodiles and iguanas.

Snakes are a big new fad—especially, say dealers, among women. Pythons and boa constrictors, at about $5 a foot, are the most popular. Seattle Dealer Dawayne Goodburn considers them “good family pets, very clean and companionable and easy to feed.” He recently sold a 5-ft. South American boa to a family with 2½-year-old girl triplets. Snake-fancying Sophomore Laurie Vitt of Western Washington State College has a python, rattlesnake, tokay gecko and two boas, which he keeps in his room with his tarantulas when his parents entertain. One evening, he was treating the boas to some live white rats when the guests, hearing the squeals, wandered in. “For some reason,” says Laurie, “everybody stopped drinking.”

Conversation Piece. Dealers are doing a brisk business in hawks, owls and toucans. More surprising as a feathered friend is the vulture, but Chicago Dealer Bernie Hoffman sells at least a dozen a year at $50 a head. “A vulture,” he observes, “makes a wonderful conversation piece sitting on the chandelier.” Bernie Hoffman can sell all the tarantulas ($5 each) he can lay hands on. He insists that “tarantulas can really be quite tame. They learn to love their masters. You can teach them to crawl up your arm.”

Some more understandable collector’s items are such handsome felines as house-cat-size margays, ocelots and cheetahs—Oregon Sportsman John S. Day, 55, uses his cheetah, Mike, for hunting and exercise. Exotic animals can be habit-forming. Jeri Hines, a Los Angeles divorcee with three children, bought a boa constrictor a couple of years ago. Since then, she has acquired an alligator, an aquatic toad, a green iguana and a tire eel, and has had to move to a new district because none of her neighbors would let their children into her house.

In a two-room Manhattan apartment, Composer George Kleinsinger lives with nine free-flying tropical birds, six tanks of tropical fish, a python, a boa constrictor, an iguana and two other lizards. Though he himself has never been hurt by his pets, Kleinsinger swears that a woman friend, whose margay bit off part of her ear, had a surgeon remove a similar fragment from the other ear, “so they’d match.”

Maim, Maul & Kill. The vogue for exotic pets has been whetted by a spate of books about wild animals, by Walt Disney nature pictures, and by the U.S. passion for the “conversation piece.” Also, most far-out species are only a day away by jet transport.* Not everyone is happy about the trend. In Denver last November, when a city health official tried to introduce a law to put exotic pets under firm control, animal lovers raised such a hue and cry that the proposed ordinance was withdrawn. However, Denver’s Eileen F. Schoen, a member of the American Humane Association, wrote a fiery article in the current National Humane Review condemning exotic pets. “They are a problem of major importance to humane organizations,” said Mrs. Schoen last week, throwing into her files a Jan. 19 clipping from the San Francisco Chronicle headed vicious MAULING: PET LEOPARD’S ATTACK ON GIRL. “Exotic pets often become irksome, and the owners pass them on to others. With each new owner, the animal becomes more difficult to handle. We’ve got to reverse this thing. Animals taken from the wild are still wild, and they often maim, maul and occasionally kill.”

Fancy animal fanciers, in other words, should heed the limerick:

Unconventional King Montezuma

Made a pet of a petulant puma.

Now theQueen’s wearing black,

For the pet patted back—

An example of animal huma.

* One indicator of the extent of the fad is at New York’s Kennedy Airport, where the A.S.P.C.A. maintains an “Animalport” for transient beasts, birds and reptiles. Since 1958, it has accommodated some 500,000 guests.