Animal Farm

Living on an exotic animal farm

I basically grew up in a zoo. My parents collected exotic animals and nurtured them on our farm. It was in Minnesota so some of the animals needed a lot of care and attention in the winters. I was young and I was allowed to name most of the animals, so their names are mostly straightforward.
My TV heroes growing up were Steve Irwin and Jeff Corwin. They traveled the world and showed us the beauty of nature’s strangest and deadliest animals. I just had to go out my front door to see some of them.
My parents divorced and sold the animals and farm when I was nine so I don’t really have any photos of them to access on my computer. When they were sold we ensured that the animals were brought to caring and properly equipped homes, they were our family pets after all.

Ostrich (Ozzy)

An ostrich is a straight up dinosaur that has exactly no time for your shit. He was a solitary male that just patrolled his territory. He would walk around puffing himself up to look bigger, since he apparently wasn’t already, and make a loud, low pitched drumming sound. If you ever ride into battle on an ostrich, just know that they come preinstalled with a battle drum. That territory was surrounded by an electric fence, so the two often met. Very often. The fence couldn’t do any real harm but it must have confused him because every time he would jump back and begin a mating dance, which is the clumsiest thing you can imagine. If dinosaurs acted like ostriches than Jurassic Park would be a lot less majestic and have Benny Hill’s Yakety Sax as a theme song. We got rid of him because he became more and more protective of my mom, but not in the Chris Pratt way. If he saw my dad with my mom he would get angry that another male was intruding on his territory. One day my dad went inside to check on the animals. He brought a section of metal fence to use as a shield in case the ostrich tried anything. It did.

Come at me bro!

The ostrich kicked through the metal fence to get at the tiny 6’ 7”, 280 pound (2m, 125kg for those of you in countries that haven’t landed on the Moon) Hooman behind it. It threw him back and was stomping on the fence to get at him. By some miracle my dad threw him off and backed carefully back to the gate. The only major injuries were a bruise at the spot where it kicked him and a sore back.
We sold him shortly after the attack and gave him to a farm with other ostriches, since he seemed to be looking for a mate and the emus weren’t fooling him anymore.

Majestic

TL:DR Hurr de durr I’m a dynosor flee hoomans.

Fainting Goats (Babe, Billy, Phyllis, Lucky…)

These are most people’s favorite after the Ostrich. Yes they are real and they are hilarious. Imagine watching a herd of the goats from Goat Simulator and you pretty much see fainting goats. They are purposefully bred to lock up their legs when frightened, meaning they trip and fall a lot. This doesn’t hurt them unless they jump off something, get scared, and miss the landing. Sheep farmers used them to be a… wait for it… scapegoat to protect their sheep from wolves. The goats would lock up and not keep up with the sheep, making the wolves think they are injured and focusing on them while the sheep get away. Life’s rough when you’re a goat.
If anything can beat the sheer stupidity of an ostrich or an emu, it’s a goat. They think in purely two dimensions despite being excellent climbers. If you pick up a kid (Young goat) to pet it or check up on it, the mother goat panics as if some unimaginable dimensional warp sucked her kid into the nether zone of height. She will start panicking, making her kid panic as well. The mother will look around for her kid, 5 feet away, until you put it back on the ground. Bless their hearts.
We had other breeds of goats as well. Pygmy goats are cuter variety of goat because they have short hair, short horns, and are relatively small. (Pygmy goats are small. Mind-blowing, I know)
We had one Angora goat my mom named after Phyllis Diller. Angoras look like sheep, enough so that our sheep tried, unsuccessfully, to woo her for about 3 years. She was a rescue after someone found her in a ditch. Let’s get one thing clear about this goat: She was once owned by Rasputin. We rescued her in subzero temperatures. (That’s -18 C for those of you in Non-Lunar nations) She was fine, but we didn’t expect her to live very long as she was probably about 16 years old from the look of her. Nah, she lived another 5 years until we sold her and probably lives to this day. Sad three healthy kids that are also probably immortal. Unless she was an elf goat, and gave up her immortality in order to breed with a pygmy.

TL;DR Fainting Goats are funny. Pygmy Goats are cute, Angora Goats are immortal, and Sheep are horny.

Ameraucana Chickens (Rooster named Charlemagne)

Ameraucana are a breed of chicken that lays green, pink, and blue eggs. They don’t taste any different from normal eggs. (Note: If you haven’t had eggs gathered 30 minutes before being cooked, what are you doing with your life?) Not much to say about them really. They're chickens… with funny eggs, and that makes them exotic.

TL:DR Sam-I-Am I do like green eggs and ham.

Fear the Terror of the Outback!

Emus are the slightly smaller variety of dinosaur. They are just a dumb, though. The only shenanigans I really remember was when they chased me down thinking I was an intruder or a predator. They aren’t very observant and I was in the pasture checking on the goats. (Guard raptors are very effective) I turned around and saw this. (More terrifying than funny when it’s coming straight at you and making pissed of hissing snake sounds)

Emu Chase

I could run maybe a third as fast as them, so I ran circles around a bush until she got dizzy and fell over. Once it got up and realized who I was it backed off.

TL;DR I’m Chris Pratt, and they respected the Alpha

Prepare your Inbox

Peacock. Beautiful, dumb, aggressive creatures. They are very pretty but will peck the living shit out of anything that approaches. We lost a cat to them. After that we sold them to another farm because they were just too high maintenance and not very friendly. Basically the mini-raptors of the family, they were the size of real velociraptor rather than the Dromeosaurides portrayed in the Jurassic series, but I digress. (I have a few weeks on dig sites and have always been obsessed with dinosaurs, in case the Jurassic references didn’t tip you off)

TL;DR Beauty is a nice way of covering up being a bitch.

Godzilla the dwarf iguana

This was the biggest indoor pet we had. My dad’s rule was “no fur or feathers” on indoor pets. It was a female that I named Godzilla. Her name was rather ironic, because she was born with a calcium deficiency and was “fully” grown when we bought her. She was only about 3 and a half feet long, (1m for you other guys) which is a little over half the size she should have been, and had a small calcium growth in her cheek. She was a surprisingly affectionate lizard so long as you had food or were outside in the sun. We had to be careful because she was surprisingly fast on open terrain and loved water. We would fill up pools outside and let her sit in the bathtub to moisturizeme.gif every so often. My dad and I build a large, heated box that filled up a large portion of my room. Every few days I would put new banches from trees in their and she would climb between the levels. An important thing that a lot of people do not know about iguanas is that they are herbivores. A lettuce salad with chopped carrots and peaches will make the happiest iguana you have ever seen, which pretty much looks like an iguana. They aren't very expressive creatures.

TL;DR Iguana made a good mini-dinobro

Hedgehogs

Don’t get them. They suck and are not cute.

TL;DR They Suck.

WARNING: NOPES TO FOLLOW

Tarantulas

The first Nope I ever had was a Chilean Rose-Haired Nope called Rose. She (I’m guessing) was the size of the average person’s palm and covered in spiny little hairs. If she was scared (It happened once when I moved to close to her) she would rub her back legs on her thorax and eject the hairs, which make you nose itch and smell really, really bad. I had her for 6 or 7 years before she… escaped. We went on vacation, so we gave her enough crickets to last for the time we would be gone, but when we came back, she had crawled up the glass of the terrarium and figured out how to open the cage. Never saw her again. Some say she is noping to this day.

TL;DR Minnesota probably has a giant spider plotting its revenge.

Scorpions.

Millipede

I had two Giant Millipedes. (Originally) The first thing they did when they got in their cage was get it on, which is quite possibly the most disgusting thing I have ever laid my eyes upon. It involves the letter “λ” and juices. I was cleaning out their food dish a couple weeks later and a nope army spewed forth and began climbing up the sink. I care for animals and don’t usually get scared by nopes, but you bet your ass I destroyed the abominations with extreme prejudice. I kept the adults for a while and all I can really say about them is that a millipede crawling on your arm is one of the most soothing but weird feelings. I feels like a tiny wave moving up your arms and their weight is tugging on you.

TL;DR Millipedes are hard to get rid of.