I want to hear from the people with pets like centipedes, prarie dogs, alligators, scorpions, vultures, octupus… What is taking care of your pet like?
I used to have 2 sugar gliders. Very high maintenance pets. They are very social and will get depressed without enough attention. They are also group animals and when you get them you adapt them to your scent as the “home tree”. This means you being gone for let’s say a vacation or something will stress them out to the extreme.
Since they are basically wild animals they have a very strict diet you also need to maintain, on top of them being picky eaters, can’t really give them the same food more than 2 days in a row or they won’t eat it. They often take a bite or two of food before throwing it and going for a new piece.
All that being said they can be very fun and loving animals. They live a long time and are quite smart. Their little hands look like people’s thumbs and all and they LOVE untying knots and anything plastic that crinkles. Had them through college and had a tapestry on every wall so it was fun letting them run around the apartment free and climbing where ever. Always a good laugh when someone was over and didn’t know they were out. They would lead across the room to get back to me or the cage and seeing someone freak out as they saw something dive bombing them out of their peripheral never got old. My favorite thing about them was this demonic noise called crabbing that they make when they are scared or upset.
Had stick insects for a while. Very easy to care for. In fact kind of too easy, as the main challenge is to stop them from rapidly multiplying in number. They can also procreate asexually, just cloning themselves over and over.
Neighbor had an emu in a very suburban neighborhood. It was tall enough to look over the fence and would scare the day lights out of the local children.
There’s a hawk in my yard that likes me. When I walk out, it flies to the nearest fence and waits for me to comfort/feed it, like a dog who had just realized its dinner has just been poured.
The times I do feed it, mostly seed mix, the same kind one might find in a barn. Hawks are in a three-way war with owls and crows and I otherwise am glad it goes after them and that it’s hawks I have (more of a hindsight thing, I don’t like to think their death is encourageable, but owls are noisy and crows are destructive).
I had 4 Madagascar hissing cockroaches for several years. They are docile (female) to feisty (male). As long as they have plants to eat, things to hide in, and water to drink, they’re good. Mine seemed to especially love eating slightly damp rose petals.
