Hey kids, are you bored?
September 15, 2017 7:08 AM   Subscribe

Go catch a skunk! The Golden Book of Wild Animal Pets harkens back to a very different and not-all-that-long-ago era.

The author, Roy Pinney, was a former war correspondent who covered the D-Day landings. He lived an interesting life and died at age 98 in 2010, with one obituary that heralded him as "the most interesting Jew in New York. Explorer, herpetologist, renowned baby photographer, cameraman, he lived by his advice on pets and lived in an apartment full of exotic snakes. He wrote many books, starting with How to Survive an Atomic Attack in 1961 and ending with The Snake Book in 1981. His other books included:

Pets from Wood, Field and Stream
Vanishing Tribes
Quest for the Unknown: Explorers of Today
The Complete Book of Cave Exploration
The Golden Book of Nature Crafts
Underwater Archeology
Slavery: Past and Present
Vanishing Wildlife
Wild Life in Danger
Collecting and Photographing your Microzoo
Young Isreal
Animals From the Bible
posted by fimbulvetr (13 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
I had this book as a kid in the 80s! I would, with some regularity, catch turtles and frogs and bring them home, and my parents would let me keep them in a tank and feed them for a few days or a week before returning them to the wild. I imagine it was a little traumatizing for the animals, but they are some of my fondest childhood memories.

Today, I let my daughters bring home snails and caterpillars for little visits, but vertebrates are right out.
posted by 256 at 7:45 AM on September 15, 2017 [1 favorite]


Yep, turtles, snakes, frogs, crayfish: all good short-term childhood 'pets'.

The best was when we got toads to eat lightning bugs, then watched the toads blink on and off for a few hours.

I don't know about 'bygone', I see my friends doing this stuff with their kids, and plan to do the same with mine when he's older.

Then again, my basis of 'normal' may be off. My parents also led the way at keeping a pet raccoon for a few years, and at some point we lost track of all the different species of critters that we kept. For a decade or so our house was known as the 'the crazy animal house' and similar...
posted by SaltySalticid at 7:57 AM on September 15, 2017 [4 favorites]


My 71-year old dad sent me the link to the Atlantic article with the explanation "My cousin had a skunk, raccoon, pigeons, and who knows what else that I played with. We only had a dog, chameleon and a rabbit. I tried to catch squirrels, birds, and rabbits. The neighbour had a lion and a monkey."

My kids bring all sorts of invertebrates into the house . . . spiders, insects, snails, and other creepy-crawlies. They catch snakes, frogs, fish, crayfish and whatever else they can get their hands on, but they always let them go after a while because they don't want to hurt them and want them to go back to their home in the wild. When I was a kid I used to catch and keep various frogs, toads, turtles, snakes, salamanders, and assorted creepy-crawlies, but never mammals. The most memorable thing we kept for a while was a mud-puppy. Everything got returned at some point though.
posted by fimbulvetr at 8:02 AM on September 15, 2017


Mind you, we also had dogs, cats, rabbits, rats, horses and goats when I was growing up.
posted by fimbulvetr at 8:04 AM on September 15, 2017


Hey kids! Go catch some rabies! Or maybe even leprosy if you find an armadillo!
posted by jim in austin at 8:07 AM on September 15, 2017 [2 favorites]


Man, this kind of thing takes me back. I still try to catch frogs every chance I get.
posted by univac at 8:17 AM on September 15, 2017


Heh... kids and animals...

I tried one time to catch snails in a cardbox box terrarium I made myself... No top cover... Mom was just a little tiny bit unhappy about finding them all over the kitchen. At about the same age, I would catch and release frogs, tadpoles and newts/salamanders.

Later, on the farm - we had chickens, ducks, rabbits (*cough* don't get "attached" to them Jason...), cows and horses - and of course pets like guinea pigs, gerbils, hamsters...

Even later, when I got older I really really wanted a falcon, hawk or even a raven - but even though I was outdoorsy, I knew that they wouldn't be great pets. Actually - I think my time at the farm taught me about that...

Northern farm, there was a trapline. One winter, during a particularly nasty cold stretch a Great Snowy Owl got one of it's legs caught in a trap while trying to snag the bait. The oldest of us young folks got a nasty clawing trying to get him out of the trap - the local rural vet was called, the foot/talon was amputated and he was nursed back to health. And eventually by spring, he was released... Well... needless to say he loved our rabbits, chickens and ducks and was still a force to be reckoned with, even with just one working talon... (perhaps, in hindsight he should have been released a bit further into the woods...)

My kids... Dogs, fish (hundreds over the years), cats, bunnies, bearded dragons and lately birds... If they would, they would have every type of creature imaginable. And spend all their time with them.

Kids are fascinated by life... When taking care of it, they fundamentally know that it is fragile and precious.

Nothing wrong with that - in my opinion many of the problems we have as societies occur the further we abstract ourselves away from nature and the overall food/life-cycle.
posted by jkaczor at 8:22 AM on September 15, 2017 [2 favorites]


I'm going to add something here about Animal Inn, by Virginia Moe. My elementary school library had a copy of this book and I must have signed it out a couple times a year.

We had a pet wasp nest, until the gas meter reader gave my parents a choice between gas or the wasps.
posted by lagomorphius at 9:05 AM on September 15, 2017 [1 favorite]


And I'd be remiss not to mention one of the all-time greats, I'll Trade You an Elk. The incubator story is one of the best things ever.
posted by lagomorphius at 9:13 AM on September 15, 2017


I grew up on a farm and wasn't until later in life it really dawned on me that others don't see a turtle scooting by and run over to grab it, or wrap a hand around right behind a garter snake's head to pick it up and show it off to everyone. I'm in my forties and will still try and grab a little frog jumping around, if only to release him further away from people.

Contrary to popular belief, when I did this generally the girls/women were much more interested in checking out the animal, whereas guys generally looked at me like I was crazy.

Skunks and raccoons, though, man, I try to stay away from them. A garter snake, they don't like being played with but won't mess you up; most mammals are ready to fight if you put hands on them. Raccoons were in our trash once, on our deck, and one failed to escape my sudden appearance by diving between the bannisters; his back end was too wide. I had to put a toe on his butt and push a little to free him, that's as close as I want to get to a raccoon.
posted by AzraelBrown at 9:17 AM on September 15, 2017 [3 favorites]


My dad, as a child, has a raccoon for a pet. It was named Joe.

He also raised hamsters, which he sold to the Woolworth's downtown, in one of the old horse stalls on the ground floor of the giant carriage house where he grew up in the 1940s.

Somewhere there is a photo of my dad, buzz-cut and high-waters, with a raccoon on a leash, standing on historic Summit Avenue; James J. Hill would have had a fit, and I really don't know what Fitzgerald would have thought, scarcely two blocks from his old house.
posted by wenestvedt at 10:44 AM on September 15, 2017


I did this as a kid n the 70s. Mainly snakes and lizards, but one time we somehow managed to catch a possum. It was foul-tempered and smelled awful, so after a few days my parents decided to take it to the lake and let it go in the woods. Somehow it managed to escape from both its cage and the car within a mile from the house. We never did figure out how it did it. I don't recall the book in the post (although there were a lot of Golden Books in our house so I may have had it). This book was our go to reference for wild animal care. It was full of good information in the pre-internet age.
posted by TedW at 5:20 PM on September 15, 2017


I don't think we had that specific book though we had many similar ones. Box turtles found crossing the road especially were fascinating to bring home and hang out with for a few hours before releasing them in suitable habitat. I learned to be a softie from my parents, catching mice in homemade live traps and releasing them rather than using kill traps. Just yesterday I encouraged a young garter snake to move from a spot where it was sure to get run over.

While other than bringing them home for short visits I never caught and raised wild animals, others in the extended family did so all the time up until maybe the early 1980s. I'm not sure what changed, if it was changing middle class norms, or something about the Reagan years, but by 1983 the only pets throughout my extended family were typical cats, dogs, and rodents, nothing wild or exotic.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:34 AM on September 16, 2017


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