Posted on 04/20/2021 3:59:07 PM PDT by SamAdams76
IN 1722, A PET SQUIRREL named Mungo passed away. It was a tragedy: Mungo escaped its confines and met its fate at the teeth of a dog. Benjamin Franklin, friend of the owner, immortalized the squirrel with a tribute.
“Few squirrels were better accomplished, for he had a good education, had traveled far, and seen much of the world.” Franklin wrote, adding, “Thou art fallen by the fangs of wanton, cruel Ranger!”
Mourning a squirrel’s death wasn’t as uncommon as you might think when Franklin wrote Mungo’s eulogy; in the 18th- and 19th centuries, squirrels were fixtures in American homes, especially for children. While colonial Americans kept many types of wild animals as pets, squirrels “were the most popular,” according to Katherine Grier’s Pets in America, being relatively easy to keep.
By the 1700s, a golden era of squirrel ownership was in full swing. Squirrels were sold in markets and found in the homes of wealthy urban families, and portraits of well-to-do children holding a reserved, polite upper-class squirrel attached to a gold chain leash were proudly displayed (some of which are currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Most pet squirrels were American Grey Squirrels, though Red Squirrels and Flying Squirrels also were around, enchanting the country with their devil-may-care attitudes and fluffy bodies.
By the 19th century, a canon of squirrel-care literature emerged for the enthusiast. In the 1851 book Domestic pets: their habits and management, Jane Loudon writes more about squirrels as pets than rabbits, and devotes an entire chapter to the “beautiful little creature, very agile and graceful in its movements.” Squirrels “may be taught to jump from one hand to the other to search for a hidden nut, and it soon knows its name, and the persons who feed it.” Loudin also waxes on their habits, like jumping around a room and peeping out from wooden eaves, writing that “an instance is recorded of no less than seventeen lumps of sugar being found in the cornice of a drawing-room in which a squirrel had been kept, besides innumerable nuts, pieces of biscuit.” Loudon’s advice: when your squirrel is not running around the room, provide it with a tin-lined cage that has a running wheel.
Leisure Hour Monthly, meanwhile, in 1859, advised to feed it “a fig or a date now and then,” and that you should start your squirrel-raising adventure with those procured “directly from the nest, when possible.” The unnamed author’s own pet squirrels, Dick and Peter, had the freedom of his bedroom and plenty of nuts to store away. “Let your pet squirrels crack their own nuts, my young squirrel fanciers,” the author wrote.
While many people captured their pet squirrels from the wild in the 1800s, squirrels were also sold in pet shops, a then-burgeoning industry that today constitutes a $70 billion business. One home manual from 1883, for example, explained that any squirrel could be bought from your local bird breeder. But not unlike some shops today, these pet stores could have dark side; Grier writes that shop owners “faced the possibility that they sold animals to customers who would neglect or abuse them, or that their trade in a particular species could endanger its future in the wild.”
Keeping pet squirrels has a downside for humans too, which eventually became clear: despite their owners’ best attempts at taming them, they’re still wild animals. As time wore on, squirrels were increasingly viewed as pests; by the 1910s squirrels became so despised in California that the state issued a widespread public attack on the once-adored creatures. From the 1920s through the 1970s many states slowly adopted wildlife conservation and exotic pet laws, which prohibited keeping squirrels at home. Today, experts and enthusiasts alike warn that squirrels don’t always make ideal pets, mainly because of their finicky diet, space requirements, and scratchy claws.
None of this, of course, will deter the most determined squirrel owner. Fans of Bob Ross might remember his pet squirrel named Peapod, and some squirrels owners are rekindling the obsession by making their pets Instagram-famous. Still, wild squirrels surely agree—it’s probably best we’re now mostly leaving them to the forest.
America was scenic and picturesque — nature and woodland reveries for the folks. Then something bad happened: They took in some Communists and Marxists and sh!t began to happen.
With the Marxists God was despised. People went to university and lost all their Christian upbringing and became full-fledged Marxist — without even knowing so. One race was pitted against another race — class warfare — and that became know as identity politics. The Christian white race which brought in the Marxist soon learnt that they were racists. They learnt to shut up or be threaten with cancel culture, threaten by BLM and Antifa. They learned that they couldn’t defend themselves, that America was an evil country. They learned that justice only favored a certain people with ethnic, sexual and racial grievances against America, favored the rich Democrats, favored the people in charge. All the problems brought the country to a state of terrible unrest and an undeclared civil war.
The squirrels liked America of old. They would never have let in the Marxists. They would never have taken pity on that little viper who has grown up in the universities and turned them into a snake pit of their own deadly kind.
Watch out for squirrel ladies.
They are nuttier than cat ladies
They make awful good gravy.. :)
When Squirrels Were One of America’s Most Popular Pets.
They were pets too long. Now they are politicians.
Prairie dogs are cute, but one can’t keep them as pets, because they carry Plague.
I was elk hunting up in the Idaho/Wyoming area and standing under a fir tree, being real quiet, dink! Off the top off my head a pine cone hits. I look up and this little squirrel is looking down. I figure the little butt head dropped his meal, then I move a few feet over and dink! Another pine cone. This happened several times. I look up and he looks at me comes down about half way and chatters like a buzz saw. Then I figure any elk around are knowing I’m here and move up the ridge. Smart? Well he got rid of me.
Ferrets are good if you have a rabbit problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XerUmuPStyY
Bernie Goetz likes them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjF5ccIrP8Q
Parrots can be quite mean.
My old aunt (deceased now for fifteen years) referred to squirrels as ‘bushy-tailed rats’. She cheered on all the cats in the neighbourhood, in their squirrel hunts.
They don’t. My dog brought two infants to his dog bed. Found them in the woods when a nest was overturned after a storm. One died from internal injuries.
Hand fed the survivor. Cute. Had a cage built. Learned to get out....and out of the house through the dryer vent. Acorns kept showing up in my dirty clothes basket.
Would finally mature and would growl and bite when I would try to feed. Bye-bye.
Handed her over to a vet tech who lived in the country. We had cats.
Now I think of them as tree rats. They have screwed up our plumbing vents to the tune of several hundred dollars.
And I don’t brake for them anymore.
John Singleton Copley who portrayed a number of our founders and probably most famous for his portrait of Paul Revere, painted a portrait of a young Henry Pelham with a pet squirrel...
It must go with the name. I used to have a Tervuren named Ranger who carried squirrel eradication to an artform. I had trees in opposing corners of my yard. He knew the exact sweet spot where a squirrel needed to be for him to launch and get to the squirrel before it could reach one of the trees. There was a small zone where the squirrels would briefly hesitate for just a fraction of a second to decide which tree was their better option and that brief moment gave Ranger all the time he needed to close the deal.
That’s cute. Squirrels are fun, as long as they don’t get too nervous or over excited. Hence the term ‘Squirrely’.
The animal was probably added to the composition later by the painter. I can’t see a squirrel sitting in place for hours like the boy probably did to produce stetches.
Lol.
I resemble that remark 😆
May God bless, FRiend,
Tatt
If only you could make that rhyme as a poem... it would be around for generations.
Tree rats.
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