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.

Time is flying so fast that I sometimes forget that I was living before the rise of television and computers. A few days ago I came across my nearly forgotten photographs of stone-age people. Stone-aged people in my life time? Just look at the following photographs.

In 1968, having spent four months among the former head-hunting Dyak of Borneo, some of whom still had skulls hanging in their longhouses, I traveled briefly to Irian Jaya, Indonesia'western half of New Guinea, where I watched real men sharpening and using stone axes.

But then, on Indonesia's more than 17,000 islands, over 900 of which are inhabited, and of which I visited eight over a period of seven months, you can experience the most amazing variety of civilizations, races, cultures, and religions there may be anywhere else over a similar area.