MACHIAS — A menagerie lives in the tongue-and-groove pine cabin nestled behind lofty cedars and hemlock.
Tortoises Hobbit and Dudley winter in the bathtub. They cede the space during the summer to a handful of leopard geckos.
Brightly-colored veiled chameleons, Rango and Jewel, and bearded dragons, Puff and Tito, bunk in a bedroom. Sherbie, an albino corn snake, feasts on frozen mice in the laundry room.
The basement is home to Charlotte and Wilbur. She’s a tarantula and he’s a skink. Also living downstairs are an African clawed frog, four chinchillas, two swimming salamanders and an African bullfrog.
Dozens of hissing cockroaches, millipedes and walking sticks crawl around cages. Lissy the wallaby and four bunnies hop around the wooded yard. Living on the five acres among the curious creatures are two dogs and a cat.
“There does get to be a point where one more animal is too many. It’s like Jenga,” said owner Judy Dahlberg, who moves some of her pets into her classroom at Valley View Middle School in Snohomish during the academic year.
Snohomish County likely is home to thousands of exotic pets like Dahlberg’s but no one keeps track of exactly how many or where they end up.
The critters come from all corners of the world. They can be darling and dangerous. And in a state that started regulating exotic pets less than a decade ago, there still is debate about whether these critters should be pets at all.
Tricky to track
In 2007, the state Legislature banned large, potentially dangerous exotic animals as pets. That list includes crocodiles, venomous snakes, bears, monkeys and big cats.
“Washington state has the best law in the country on exotic pet ownership,” said Lisa Wathne, a captive exotic animal specialist with the Humane Society of the United States.
Though some animals are banned, the steady stream of cute-and-cuddly critter videos online has led to smaller exotic pets becoming more popular. Among these so-called pocket pets are sugar gliders, hedgehogs, chinchillas and ferrets.
Pets can also be trendy.
“Anytime there’s a movie that features specific animals, you see those animals become fad pets,” Wathne, of Lake Forest Park, said. After the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” movie, the popularity of pet turtles spiked. Similarly, many parents bought clownfish for their kids after the movie “Finding Nemo” hit theaters in 2003.
Exotic pets are part of a multibillion global market for wild animals, according to estimates by the Humane Society. The trade includes animals sold for their bodies or parts, not just as pets.
A patchwork of city, county, state and federal laws apply to exotic pets.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regulates endangered or threatened species. The state Department of Fish and Wildlife handles native species and manages exotics that are causing problems for indigenous animals. It gives permits for wildlife to be kept for research and education, but not as pets.
The state Department of Agriculture has standards for exotic animals as they come into Washington, to make sure they don’t bring diseases. More than 1,665 exotics have entered the state so far this year. In 2014, there were 2,107.
Once the animals are here, they’re not tracked. Where they end up is mostly unknown unless they make headlines.
In one news story, an alligator and a tarantula were rescued from a house fire in Sultan last year. An emu named Curious George died after it was hit by a car while taking a trot on Everett’s Hewitt Avenue Trestle in 2011. Zebras took shelter from floods in 2006 at the Monroe fairgrounds.
Snohomish County doesn’t have rules for exotic pets beyond state law, but some cities do. Sellers are not obligated to tell buyers whether an animal is legal where they live. Since local animal control agencies and state departments share regulation and enforcement duties, there isn’t one place to check all of the rules.
That’s something Mike Cenci, deputy chief for state Fish and Wildlife, wants to fix. The agency has animal rules on its website but the list is not comprehensive.
“I think we owe it to the public to have an information source,” Cenci said.
A risky wild side
Snohomish County Animal Control sometimes responds to calls about exotic creatures. Complaints usually are about loose pets, nuisances and animal welfare. The agency checked on sugar gliders that were being sold at this year’s Evergreen State Fair.
Fish and Wildlife is also occasionally called on to capture non-native animals, such as kangaroos and California sea lions, Cenci said. Creatures that are uncommon in Washington are harder to handle, he said.
When exotic pets get loose, it can be disastrous for native animals, said Patricia Thompson, a biologist with Fish and Wildlife. Ferrets, for one, are predators that can kill local wildlife. She discourages exotic pets, even those that are legal.
While having a pet can be enjoyable, people run into trouble when they don’t understand how to properly care for their animal or realize how long it might live, State Veterinarian Joe BakerCQ said.
Paul Lewis runs the Forgotten Kingdom animal rescue in Tulalip, which specializes in pets that don’t normally have a place at a shelter. He’s taken in snakes, spiders, reptiles, fish, rodents, birds, even a coatimundi, a relative of the raccoon which he describes as South America’s version of a lemur. A few alligators and crocodiles were left at the rescue after the state outlawed them 2007.
Eight of 10 animals that come to the nonprofit are dropped off by owners who can no longer care for them, he said. “If everybody, when they get a pet, takes care of it, I’d be out of job,” Lewis said.
Now, the Internet makes it easy for people to buy almost any animal. Pet alligators are illegal in Washington, but that doesn’t mean people can’t order a baby gator online and find a way to get it home, Lewis said.
Many people buy critters that look cute or cool only to discover they require more care than expected or the veterinary bill costs more than they can pay. Exotics need certain habitats, temperatures, humidity, security and veterinary specialists, Lewis said.
Brett and Keri RickardCQ are raising their family which includes a two-year old pet wallaby, Taz. It’s been one lesson after another.
He isn’t as cute and cuddly as he was as a joey. They carried him around in a makeshift pouch fashioned from grocery bags and bottle fed him. He stayed in an enclosure in their Arlington home. But once he discovered outside, he didn’t want to come back in.
“Taz is a wild animal,” Keri Rickard, 29, said.
They got hit with a $1,100 veterinarian bill when Taz had tetanus. Since getting sick, he’s been skittish around people. Taz hid from strangers under the deck during a recent visit.
“He’s not like a dog,” Brett Rickard, 32, said. “He doesn’t like to cuddle.”
In March, Taz went missing for five days before he was found safe. The Rickards suspect dogs startled him enough that he parkoured the six-foot fence around their yard. The 30-pound, just under three-foot-tall wallaby has escaped a few other times but the Rickards caught him before he got too far.
The couple counts themselves lucky. Bella, a 6-year-old wallaby, went missing in January along Highway 530 just outside of Arlington and hasn’t been found.
Even little pocket pets can be more than people bargained for if they don’t do their homework.
Krissy Brouner, 30, breeds and sells hedgehogs in Everett. She also takes them back, no questions asked, if a new home doesn’t work out.
“The biggest issue people can have is not being comfortable with an animal that has quills,” she said. “They’re hoping for something small and cuddly, and hedgehogs are pokey.”
If an animal becomes too much to handle, it’s better to drop it off at a rescue than to set it loose. Hardier animals can thrive in Western Washington at the expense of native species. For example, the innocent-looking red-eared slider turtle is a popular pet but some have been set free to feast on young salmon. They also edge out native turtles by competing for habitats and breeding grounds.
Pets or pests?
The Progressive Animal Welfare Society, a Lynnwood-based nonprofit better known as PAWS, discourages people from keeping exotic pets. They can threaten the health and safety of other animals and people, said wildlife naturalist Jen Mannas.
In private homes, exotic animals can’t behave as they would in the wild. When they’re bored, they can become aggressive and destructive, she said. To prevent the animal from hurting people, they often are declawed or defanged, which can be painful and leave them defenseless.
There are few sanctuaries for exotic animals. PAWS is not one of them but has helped people find other homes. They once found a place for an African serval after the 40-pound cat bit a young girl.
Still, exotic animals sometimes are killed because there is nowhere to keep them.
Mannas believes it’s cruel to house animals in unnatural environments. Only cats and dogs make appropriate pets, she said.
Isaac Petersen cares for 225 animals at the Reptile Zoo in Monroe with his father, Scott “The Reptile Man” Petersen. Isaac Petersen said allowing people to have an up-close experience with animals is the only way to get them to care about the creatures.
“These animals are ambassadors for their counterparts in the wild,” he said.
Instead of “making criminals out of people who are just passionate about their pets,” he believes anyone should be able to own any animal they can care for.
“Obviously, there’s a lot of people who have an alligator and don’t know how to take care of it,” he said. “But you can say the same thing about cats and dogs.”
Dahlberg, with her menagerie in Machias, is an expert on her own zoo.
The 50-year-old helps her seventh graders overcome a fear of spiders by holding Charlotte. Wilbur the skink is a lesson in adaptation. The lizard has a pink mouth with a blue tongue to scare off predators.
Such odd pets do come with challenges. Sherbie the corn snake once got loose and was missing for several months before he was recovered from a storage space under the school. Dahlberg’s daughter Elise, 14, sometimes gets annoyed when crickets the lizards are supposed to eat instead get loose in her bedroom.
But, all things considered, Dahlberg believes having the animals is worth the trouble.
“A lot of kids can relate to animals better than humans,” she said.
Amy Nile: 425-339-3192; anile@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @AmyNileReports.
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