Animal house of horrors

Posted on October 1st, 2008 by Scott Stein

You don’t have to be an animal rights activist to think that it might be for the best if some people didn’t own pets. Living in the fraternity house was dangerous business for animals of any genus or phylum. The guys weren’t especially cruel. Not intentionally. Or usually. Maybe sometimes. Mostly, we just weren’t responsible enough to care for living things. Some of us weren’t responsible enough to care for ourselves. We should have practiced with plants first. A cactus might have been a good start.

A few of us owned tropical fish. There were fish shops all around Miami. I had a lionfish in a fifteen-gallon tank. It ate live goldfish — feeders, they’re called. You could get twenty of them for a dollar. (These are the fish that kids win at carnivals and that die a few hours after you take them home in a plastic bag.) You drop the feeder into the tank and the lionfish goes to work. It spreads its large fins to prevent escape and swallows the feeder whole. My lionfish was translucent — you could see the orange silhouette of the feeder inside. One feeder a day was plenty, but sometimes someone would come by after the lionfish had already eaten, and if I wanted to entertain them, I’d feed it again. I also had a yellow tang in that tank. They like to eat romaine lettuce. The lionfish couldn’t eat him — the tang was too big to swallow whole. Probably neither fish should have been in a tank that small.

Termites were discovered and over Christmas break they were going to tent the house and spray. All living things had to be removed. Transporting the tank and fish to a friend’s apartment was a pain. I had to drain enough water to be able to carry the tank and ride with it in the car without it spilling all over the place. I got it set up and headed home to New York for a couple of weeks. All my friend had to do was feed the fish. Maybe he didn’t feed them, or the move had been too much for them. When I returned to Miami, they were dead.

Gil had a 50-gallon tank on the second floor. The glass just broke one night while he was sleeping, and he woke up to water pouring onto the carpet. A dozen fish were dead. A while later he got another 50-gallon tank, with a lionfish. When he went snorkeling and found a little goby, he brought it back and put it in the tank. The lionfish kept trying to eat it. One time, the goby was missing — we saw that it was in the lionfish’s mouth. Gil smacked him a few times with the net and he spit the goby out. It was alive. The second chance didn’t last long. A few days later the goby was missing again. The lionfish had gotten him, and there wasn’t anyone waiting with a net to save him.

A few guys had snakes, constrictors. Chuck lived in the room next to mine. His ball python ate live mice, small white ones that they sold at the pet store. Reptiles were popular pets in Miami. People we knew who lived off-campus had all sorts of lizards — iguanas, monitors — and one guy had a couple of rattlesnakes in cages. We didn’t have any rattlesnakes in the house. That would’ve been dangerous. Chuck’s python was friendly. It liked to wrap itself around your arm and squeeze. It wasn’t friendly to white mice. That’s nature, though. Snakes eat mice. Maybe guys cheering at the snake attacking the mouse is nature, too. One time Chuck bought a tiny duckling — he told the pet shop owner that it was not being fed to a snake. Ducklings are cuter than mice, with their chirping and yellow feathers. Everyone felt a little bad after that feeding.

Yates had a ferret that was in between the sofa cushions in his room when someone sat down. It was a shame — he loved that ferret. Someone’s bird was in a cage on a ledge at the top of the outside staircase, while everyone was moving in at the beginning of the semester. The cage was bumped and fell fifteen feet to the ground. The bird didn’t make it.

Bruce had a pet scorpion named “Bunny.” Once, at a party, he asked this girl if she wanted to come to his room and see his bunny. She said yes. Then there was a scream and she fled the house in terror. A month later, at a weekly chapter meeting, he announced that his scorpion was missing and asked us to keep an eye out. For a few days we knew there was a scorpion loose in the house, somewhere. Bruce finally found it stuck in a door hinge. It had injured a claw, but lived. And someone once lost a boa constrictor for a couple of weeks before it turned up behind a dresser, alive and well.

Golik exemplified why the boys and animals didn’t mix. He adopted a greyhound — when dogs from the racetrack were past their prime, their owners had no use for them. Golik brought the greyhound to the house and wanted to show us how fast it was. He weighed maybe 300 pounds — Golik, not the dog. These weren’t athletic, football-player, offensive-line pounds. These were sitting-on-the-couch-eating-vats-of-Chinese-food pounds. So, when he ran across the field and the greyhound ambled alongside him, it only proved that his dog could keep up with a slow, fat man. He really wanted to show us how fast a greyhound was, so he came back the next day with a box with holes in it. He’d bought a rabbit at a pet store.

In the field, he held the greyhound by the collar and showed it the rabbit, then released the rabbit, which scampered away. When he released the greyhound, it was a blur. That was a fast dog. It zipped back to us, carrying the rabbit in its mouth. The rabbit seemed uninjured. Golik released it again, and the greyhound bolted across the field and brought it back. A few seconds later, the rabbit was dead. It didn’t have visible wounds. Maybe it had been scared to death, died of a heart attack. Maybe it had internal injuries.

Golik was disappointed. He’d paid a few bucks for that rabbit, and only got two sprints out of his greyhound for his money. He didn’t think for a moment that anything was wrong with buying a rabbit to prove to us how fast his dog was. He did, however, question the cost-effectiveness of his strategy. “You know, fellas,” he said, contemplating the error of his ways, “maybe I should have bought my dog a muzzle.”