For bedding or for worseStudents share the trials and triumphs of owning pets
Laura WhiteDeputy Features Editor
The water is quiet, still.
He approaches the tank, peering down into the mess of dark stones and pebbles — it’s dinner time.
Lifting a bag of Pinkies — small, frozen rats just out of the womb — he begins to place a few into the tank.
Suddenly, the water stirs. There’s a ripple, a splash, and a second later Brandon Navratil is holding his hand while Mary, his caiman alligator, is slipping quietly back into the water, a Pinkie in her mouth.
“Eventually, everybody gets bitten,” the sophomore in fisheries and wildlife science said. “Animals are animals; they have instincts, it’s whether you cross the line or not.”
Since he was five years old, Navratil has dreamed of becoming a zoologist, working with exotic reptiles in far-away places. Steve Erwin was his hero, and National Geographic and the Discovery Channel have always been his television stations of choice. However, as a child, he wasn’t allowed to have pets.
“I always wanted one, but no matter how much I asked I couldn’t have any kind,” he said.
Well, he’s more than made up for those lost years.
In addition to Mary the caiman, Navratil owns seven snakes, two baby red-haired slider turtles, one tree frog, one newt, one of the fourth-most-deadly scorpions in the world and two kittens. Talk about an animal house.
“We have a a bunch of tanks all over the house,” he said. “Some are on the floor because we don’t have enough tables to put them on.”
With the most recent addition being the scorpion — who, according to Navratil, could kill a person in 15 minutes if it were to attack — he accumulated most of the animals during the past summer when Navratil moved off campus into his house. However, he admits to having a snake in the dorm when he lived on campus.
And Navratil isn’t the only student brave enough to have challenged University Housing’s no-pets rule.
Eric Ellis, a junior in sociology, often kept his girlfriend’s birthday gift — a pet hamster, Tyson — while living in Lee Hall. His girlfriend had a whole suite full of renegades her freshman year. With everything from fish to hamsters to a chinchilla, they had their hands full keeping their pets under wraps.
When her RA found out about the pets she made the girls take them home, which wasn’t exactly a bad thing. Ellis and his girlfriend had already considered taking Tyson to live with her parents in Pennsylvania because his cage rattled loudly at night when he was running on his wheel, and they were both tired of changing the cage.
“It stunk really bad, so you had to get rid of it and get rid of it discreetly,” Ellis said.
Once the hamster was gone, though, Ellis said he and his girlfriend missed it.
“I didn’t miss the aggravation of having to change his bedding and stuff. I missed interacting with the pet,” he said.
They also missed watching it run around in its exercise ball, which they would set out on the floor and let him roam around the suite in. He said that during a football game against Boston College last year, he had a few friends over who were all playing with Tyson, and he got excited and urinated in the ball. Ellis said it was priceless, because the ball happened to be in the lap of one of his friends when it happened.
Mary the caiman isn’t the only critter with a propensity to bite. It seems Tyson the hamster was named after Mike Tyson for that very reason.
Now living off campus, Ellis is looking forward to the next pet he has decided to get — a rabbit. His roommates, while tolerant, are not quite as excited.
“I don’t care as long as he doesn’t have s— all over the apartment,” Michael Shields, a senior in animal science, said. “His room is pretty far from mine, so I really probably wouldn’t hear it.”
Navratil’s roommates, on the other hand, are very supportive of his pets. In fact, a few of them, including the scorpion, actually belong to his roommates, although Navratil generally takes care of them.
“My roommates understand that I like animals a lot and they understand where I’m going with it,” Navratil said. “Whoever knows me, they know I’m going to have animals.”
And while Navratil said one of the most fun parts of having the pets is watching them eat, he’ll admit they are more than a handful. Luckily, most of them are reptiles that only need to be fed once or so per week.
The scorpion, though, is a different story. Because it’s a baby, it’s only the size of a fingertip, and according to Navratil he and his roommates take special care to avoid coming into contact with it.
“We keep the lid on [the scorpion] and we put crickets in it and thats it,” Navratil said.
As for Mary, she is only a foot and a half long and stays in a 55-gallon tank. In about 10 years, though, she’ll be 6-feet long, and “able to kill you real quick,” according to Navratil.
“Everybody asks what we’re going to do with her,” he said, “I don’t really know. I haven’t thought that far. She grows really slow.”
Navratil said friends love coming over to his house and seeing his pets, because it’s basically like going to the zoo. And while he says it is hard for him to choose a favorite pet, at the moment it is Mary, hands down.
“She’s pretty much the most impressive animal, the way she’s built, the way she acts,” he said. “She’s lived longer than the dinosaurs.”
