ot pets

On 15 Jun 2010 at 15:14, Ben wrote: Maybe a skunk, but raccoons rarely make *good* pets, even where they're legal: http://exoticpets.about.com/cs/raccoons/a/raccoons.htm They look cute as heck in wild (we've got scads of them here and it's fun watching them, particularly when they have young), but they can be very vicious, have very sharp claws and teeth and can kill a large dog if cornered. My screwball calico female cat, "Tehter", used to take swipes at them if they wandered too close. One got ticked off and took a small hunk out of her paw. She was lucky to have survived more or less intact. She also learned that it wasn't a good idea to stalk wild turkeys or geese. After a couple of embarrassing run-ins with them, she confined herself to mice and shrews. Distemper and rabies make periodic inroads in the raccoon population here. We used to have a lot of opossums, but I haven't seen one in years--I think disease largely eradicated the local population. There are those who abandon unwanted cats in the country. Few realize that they're ill-equipped to survive long among other predators. --Chuck