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We caught the king snake in our front yard in the middle of Los Angeles of all places. We lived by the freeway and there was a fenced off green area between our neighborhood and the road. My dad built a cage that was like a playpen for babies and we kept it in our room, feed it mice from the pet store. When we moved we let it go. The tarantula we caught in the desert while salvaging driftwood for art projects. Kept in an aquarium and fed it crickets. It was pretty cool watching him come out of his hole when we dumped them in there. Later on after I had left home my dad had a pet skunk that he found as a baby wandering around alone. He said it was just as sweet as could be and very playful. he kept it in the house until it became full grown then built a pen outside for it. The first night it burrowed out and disappeared. he also had a rattlesnake that got out of it's cage and was loose in the house. He also had an attack rooster that would jump you as soon as you turned your back, a goose that bit people, a ferret that he let run wild in the house that was a toe biter and a pot bellied pig that ate too many dates that fell from his palm trees and he found in one morning dead with it's bowels halfway outside of it's body. he also had some exotic birds, one that talked and imitated sounds like the front gate sliding open.
I've heard other people say that skunks are pretty loving. They're like cats, I guess. I don't know - I've never had any desire to own one. I never knew anyone who actually had one.
We had a few fish tanks too. He learned by trial and error which fish eat other fish. The biggest bastard we had was a clown knife. He pretty much killed everything except the sucker fish.
There's a guy in Utah that trains mink to hunt rats and he takes them to ranches to help with their rat problems. I saw a video of him with his trained monitor hunting mice at a bird farm. Think he goes by the mink man or something similar on YouTube. That monitor was lighting fast.
