If You Could Domesticate A Wild Animal

I have already had a fox and a couple of raccoons as pets, so I suppose it might be nice to have a lion. My other cats probably wouldn't like that, though. I knew someone who had a lion but he was a drug dealer so I didn't hang around much. Actually I only knew him from having been dispatched there with the ambulance a couple of time. Other than being a drug dealer, he seemed like a nice guy.

 

Oh, you're not going to train them to use a litter box but if you take them out, as you would a dog, you can avoid those kind of problems. The ones that I had lived outside or in the barn, however, because my mom wouldn't even let the dogs and cats in the house. Raised from a kitten, they were very tame, in the way that cats are. They love talking, but want to be able to look at your face while they are chattering away. One problem is that they don't retract their claws like cats do, and don't seem to realize that there might be a problem when they climb up to your shoulder while you're wearing short pants.

However, they got along fine with our dogs and, while our cats hated them, they pretty much left one another alone. Since ours lived outdoors, after a few years, they would begin to re-wild themselves to some extent, but they still stuck around the house most of the time, and would come up to me when I called them. I know a few people who have had raccoons as pets for their whole lives, though.

Another raccoon, I picked up while working at a Boy Scout camp one summer, when I was thirteen. He stayed in our cabin at night and would let me know when she needed to go out. Unless it was raining, we'd leave a window open for her to come and go as she pleased. That raccoon would follow me along the trails at the Boy Scout camp.

I think they could be fully domesticated if you were to raise a couple generations of them but, of course, that's against the law.

Our fox was probably my favorite pet. The mom had been caught in someone's trap, so my dad brought one of the babies home. I don't know who took the other three. She was kept in the shed for a few days, until she could acclimate, but was free to go wherever she wanted to after that.

She was very much like a dog on amphetamines. Very playful and friendly for the first couple of years, and never mean. I enjoyed getting off the school bus to have the fox run out and jump into my arms, leaping into the air, knowing I'd catch her. We had two dogs, and the younger one would play with her. The older one didn't like her but, at seventeen, he wasn't too crazy about the other dog either. The fox would try to get him to play, and that would annoy him.

After scolding her a couple of times when she showed an interest, she left our chickens alone.

The fox liked to be cuddled, petted, and played with, and loved going for walks in the woods, where she would usually run ahead, then come back as if to encourage me to hurry up.

After a couple of years, she started wandering at night, but would be back in the morning. Eventually, she would be away for a few days at at time, then come home to rest up for couple of days. Finally, after about two and a half years, she didn't come back. About a year or so after we had last seen her, we drove in the driveway one night to see a fox running away from the dog food bowl, so we figured she had been coming around for a free meal from time to time, having already made friends with our dogs.