Uncommon Pets: From Around the World

Rare are the people, anywhere in the world, who do not own pets. We may hunt or raise animals for food or labor, but we also need them for love. And you can't get more love sometimes than from a pet. 

For all the reasons we know, dogs and cats have long been the favorite of people everywhere. I love both, but have a sweeter spot for dogs, even though I have a few stories to tell about the dangerous dogs I have faced in my travels.

So I’ll concentrate today on uncommon pets. Farmers' kids sometimes adopt goats or chickens as pets. Like other animals, when young they are more adorable than the most expensive teddy bears. And how many societies can afford or even find teddy bears to buy? Those baby animals may lose their fluffiness as they grow up, but by then they are safe from the butcher's knife.

 

The same happens with the desert nomad kid who adopts a white baby camel or kid as his or her own personal toy and companion. 

Amazon forest Indians, who must hunt for food, have enough respect, and even regret, for the animals they must kill to feed their families, that that they adopt any progeny the dead animals may leave behind. 

Now family pets, those monkeys, sloths, opossums, birds, and others, will be fed and allowed to die of old age.

Tuareg Hygiene

When my two dogs have emptied their plates, they go lick each other’s. Hygiene is of course of no concern to them. And why should it, if it’s not an issue for so many people?

This reminds me of a scene that I was unable to photograph because it made me laugh so uncontrollably that, to avoid offending anyone, I had to move away.

It happened while I traveled with a Sahara Tuareg salt caravan. One man discovered before sitting down with his eight companions around a bowl of millet gruel that he had lost his spoon. I offered him the use of mine, but he rejected it as being too small. It was a metal table spoon. The other men had all larger spoons carved out of wood. If he used my spoon it would leave him at a disadvantage. He would be eating less than the other men. Those men worked way too hard for anyone of them to be forced to eat less than his already meager portion. But they had a ready solution. They simply passed their spoons around the circle. After each man had eaten a spoonful of millet, he passed his spoon to the man to the right, and took the one coming from the man to the left. And on and on until emptying the bowl. What was so comical was the matter-of-factness with which they did it.

Poor Tuareg! They have so little water, and it’s always so far from camp, that they can rarely bathe. I once saw them cool a dirty feverish baby in a big wooden bowl of water, after which they returned the used water to the drinking-water goatskin.