Three blocks from Paycor Stadium, an African serval’s grandkitten curls up on a couch and falls asleep purring in human arms.
A Russian tortoise trundles around a fenced-in yard in Amelia, accepting watermelon treats from owner Angie Tucker and check-in sniffs from her Pomeranians.
And when CityBeat knocks on a door in Wyoming, 5-year-old Vera van Leersum runs to the door to show off her birthday presents: a bearded dragon and a tarantula.
“All the animals are my favorite,” she says, but the ones given places of honor by her toy chest creep and crawl.
About 62% of Americans — 207 million individuals — live with animals, and most consider them part of the family, according to a 2023 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center.
Almost all of these animals are domestic cats and dogs, felis catus and canis familiaris. Fewer than 7% of American households include a reptile, bird or small rodent, the American Veterinary Medicine Association found in 2024.
And although insects are the most numerous animals on Earth, arachnid- and insect-fanciers like Vera remain too rare to appear on most pet surveys at all.
“Most people feel the need to connect with animals and nature,” writes Hal Herzog, an anthrozoological scholar, in a 2010 book exploring humans’ emotional relationships with their creatures. But, he explains in the opening chapters, “Our culture tells us which species we should love, hate and eat.”
In 2004, English anthrozoologist James Serpell proposed a simple framework for how these categories are created. He hypothesized that human societies grade other species along two axes: “Affect,” or the amount of affection they evoke, and “utility,” their perceived usefulness in everyday life.
Those scoring high on both metrics, useful and loved, enjoy privileged positions in our homes and communities. (Serpell’s leading example is a guide dog for the blind.) Animals ranked low in both categories, such as rats, opossums and spiders, spend their lives scavenging from dumpsters or dodging the undersides of human shoes.
In opposite corners of the quadrant are the useful but unloved, a category that includes beef cattle, wild game and lab mice, and the useless but loved. Think of tropical fish in an aquarium or your favorite human cousin.
Each of the six human-animal relationships shared with CityBeat represents a Cincinnatian’s decision to pluck an animal from our culture’s least favored categories — hated, eaten, useless, unloved — and make a new home for it in their heart.
“[My extended family] thinks I’m crazy,” says Tucker, the tortoise owner, who also cares for a host of other reptiles and a dozen-odd arachnids. “I’ve lost my mind. With the spiders especially, they’re like, ‘No, no, no, I’m going to come burn your house down.’ But they’re my pets like everything else.”
When the pull of love and curiosity is stronger than the prospect of distaste, little girls coo over black tiger cockroaches; skunks sleep in baby carriers; and a vinegaroon, a carnivorous arachnid whose pincers grow straight out of its face, can make the perfect accessory to a manicure.
The displacement inherent in these adoptions, however, places greater-than-usual responsibility on human caretakers. An owner’s failure to prepare or provide for an unconventional pet can leave the animal deeply vulnerable in a habitat and culture not built to accommodate it.
How do you rehome a hand-reared skunk? Who inherits your tortoise after you die? And what kind of hat looks best on a bearded dragon?
CityBeat found out.
Strawberry and Vera
Strawberry the bearded dragon wears several hats, including a sequined sombrero and a derby-ready trilby, in the time Vera van Leersum shows her off to CityBeat cameras. As the primary companion of a preschooler, long accustomed to being stroked, carried and handfed, 2-year-old Strawberry tolerates the dress-up game in stolid lizard humor.
She’ll be rewarded at the end with an Argentinian Dubia roach — an unheard-of treat for her wild relatives in Australia — and a blown kiss from Vera, who received her as a birthday present two years ago.
“Reptiles are one of my favorites,” says Vera, who plans to be a mermaid veterinarian when she grows up. “My favorite thing to do with Strawberry is feed her bugs. I like every snake, and I’m not scared of spiders and tarantulas.”
Researchers have disagreed for centuries over whether most people are born with a fear of snakes and arachnids or learn it as children from watching adults, Hartig writes in Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat.
Vera makes a strong argument for the latter. Her particular fearlessness echoes horticulturist mom Lindsey van Leersum, who spent her own childhood pulling wild-caught amphibians out of the creek behind her house and begging her parents for an exotic pet.
“My big dream as a child was — I really wanted an iguana,” Lindsey says. “My parents told me no. And [one day], my mom finally said yes, I could have one, but then she found out she was pregnant with my youngest brother and changed her mind.”
As an adult, she sought a more binding agreement. Her wedding vows with husband Jeroem van Leersum included an agreement that she could bring home any animal she wanted. In the couple’s years together, the family’s Wyoming home has become a mixed-species enclosure for cats, dogs, chickens, a bearded dragon, an axolotl, a leopard gecko, a tarantula named Bluey, a fluctuating population of cockroaches and two little girls — Vera and 2-year-old sister Lucy.
Jeroem jokes that Lindsey has laundered her desire for exotic pets through the children.
Lindsey says Vera didn’t need the encouragement.
“Vera, when she was little, just became obsessed with snakes,” Lindsey says. “She would steal all of our phone-charging cords and pretend they were snakes. We bought a bunch of rubber snakes, too, and our phone cords still disappeared. And then she just had more snakes.”
After a consultation with reptile keepers at the Cincinnati Zoo, where Lindsey once worked as a landscaper, the van Leersums decided a bearded dragon would make the best starter pet for the herpetologist princess.
“Beardies” are sturdy, sweet-tempered lizards who evolved in the arid climate of eastern Australia and spread to other continents via smuggling in the ’80s. Low-maintenance, striking to see and amenable to human handling, they rank among the most popular domestic reptiles in the United States and come highly recommended as children’s pets.
The van Leersums found Strawberry at the Cin City Reptile Show. Vera fell in love. In a series of home videos recorded by Lindsey and later compiled by warm-and-fuzzy animal video distributor The Dodo, Vera reads stories to Strawberry, plays dolls with her and takes her for rides in a Barbie convertible.
She still wants a snake someday, she says as she shows off her cockroaches and adjusts her tiara headband. Lindsey admits it’s probably a matter of time.
Asked what she’d do or say to convert a person — say, a CityBeat writer’s 63-year-old father — afraid of things with scales, Vera’s solution is simple: “You gotta introduce him to the nice ones. And don’t be scared. They’re friendly!”
Banana Split, Emily and Lindley
Lindley Legg wanted to see their girlfriend, Emily Hartig, smile. So they bought her something slimy.
Banana Split, an Australian green tree frog, matches the couple’s Brat-green Over-the-Rhine apartment and the striped shirt Hartig wears to pose with him. Like Vera, the museum curator has been preoccupied with her favorite critter since childhood; like Lindsey, she’s found that unconventional pets provide an opportunity to bond with the people she loves.
Like Strawberry, Banana Split was purchased at the Cin City Reptile Show and looks fabulous in a sequined hat.
“She just always wanted a frog, and I wanted to see her childlike joy,” Legg, an environmental scientist at Procter & Gamble, says of Banana Split’s adoption. “There’s so many pictures of her as a kid with frog stuffies and frog shirts.”
“I just think they’re so cute,” Hartig says. “They are so cute. I can’t really explain it. Ever since I was a little kid, I just was drawn to them.”
“I think it’s a gay thing,” Hartig adds jokingly.
While his wild kindred dodge predatory snakes and birds in forested areas of Australia, New Guinea and New Zealand, Banana Split lives in a 34-gallon bioactive vivarium with an insect-cleaning crew, sleeps in a frog-sized hammock and eats crickets from Hartig’s hand. (“He uses his eyes to help him swallow,” Legg shares happily. “So when he swallows, his eyes become flat.”) It’s The White Lotus for an Australian green tree frog.
His favorite activity, Hartig says, is showering. Like all amphibians, Banana Split absorbs moisture through his skin, so hand-dripping water onto his head is the equivalent of a spa treatment and a cool glass of lemonade. Hartig swears he smiles.
“He’s really funny,” she says. “I think that’s also why I like frogs. I feel like they really have personality.”
Friends and family are mostly “obsessed with meeting him,” per Hartig. When Legg’s artist sister draws comics of the little family unit, she hides his smiling froggy face in each panel.
And when the couple sits down for a movie night, Banana Split joins them on Hartig’s knee.
A covey of quails, plus Katie and Teddy
Not every pet is suited for a cuddle on the couch. Rather than invite their exotics inside, Katie and Teddy Moser of Lakeside Park, Kentucky, devote considerable effort to accommodating their animals on their own terms.
The couple leaves portions of their backyard unraked in autumn so firefly larvae can overwinter safely between the wet, warm layers of leaves; they encourage the growth of milkweed to attract monarch butterflies; and they’re determined to keep their backyard quails’ lives luxurious but natural.
The Moser family had owned chickens before they moved to Lakeside Park, Katie explains as she prepares a plate of mealworms and strawberries for their small covey. But the city’s bylaws forbid the keeping of non-native birds, so the fowl were rehomed with Teddy’s parents and the search for a Kentucky-native feathered friend began.
They picked the ones that pecked at her heartstrings.
“No one really owns bobwhite quails as pets,” says Katie, a native plant designer. “Mostly they’re just being bred on farms and used for dog hunting. Basically, people will raise them and release them as dog treats. That’s not our vibe. I was like, ‘I want to take these home and love on them.’”
So she and her husband, Teddy, bought six baby quails for $12 and brought them home in a Tupperware container. While the bumblebee-sized chicks huddled under a heat lamp, Teddy built the coop with $350 in supplies from Home Depot and blueprints he’d found online.
“There’s a bit of the rescue animal aspect” to the project, Katie says. “We also really like the [prospect of] 20 eggs a week,” which they expect the three females to produce when the weather begins to warm in April.
“That’s a really fun thing because we are pretty big garden people, sustainability people as a whole,” Katie says. “I keep telling my son he’s gonna have an Easter egg hunt every morning.”
Three quail eggs equal about one chicken egg, so they’ll have an even dozen every two weeks — not bad in the egg-obsessed economy of 2025. They could compel the females to lay their eggs faster by installing a heater in the coop, but Katie says they prefer to let it happen naturally.
Likewise, they’d be thrilled to get baby quails someday. Bobwhites mate for life, and the three-to-three sex ratio in their coop is promising.
But they’re in no hurry. Teddy and Katie adopted the flock to protect them from short, utilitarian lives in service of human interests. The Moser covey still lives more or less according to natural rhythms in a natural habitat.
Just in the VIP section.
Sekhmet, Laura and David
And what about a pet that has no natural habitat at all?
Sekhmet purrs, snuggles and chases toys across her downtown Cincinnati condo like a house cat, but she’s twice the size of one. She uses a litter box and rides happily in a stroller but becomes territorial at direct eye contact from strangers. And she is smart, her owners say — smart enough that they child-lock their front and balcony doors so she doesn’t open them on her own.
One of her grandparents was a felis catus. The other was a serval, a leggy African wildcat known as one of nature’s fastest and most successful feline predators.
“It’s like having a dog, a toddler and a velociraptor in the house,” says owner Laura Arnold, who adopted Sekhmet as a kitten with her husband, David. “All those things.”
Wild-domestic hybrids like Sekhmet, an F2 Savannah cat, are classified as exotics for their close proximity to undomesticated ancestors, says Mariemont veterinarian Dr. Jeremy Zola.
But, as products of all-American genetic engineering, they’re as reliant on human care as any Persian or Goldendoodle.
“You can’t leave these cats alone,” Laura says, pointing out the baby-proofed kitchen cabinets and wall decorations hung just outside Sekhmet’s 10-foot vertical jump range. “Because they get into trouble.”
So the Arnolds work from home and don’t mind going out of their way to keep Sekhmet entertained. Their first shared pet was 17-year-old Kitty, a cat whose significant late-in-life health challenges demanded constant at-home care.
Losing him devastated the household, David says, but when they began to look for a new companion, they knew they could meet the challenge of a high-maintenance breed.
First, though, came the challenge of finding a trustworthy breeder.
Because the existence of a domestic hybrid is impossible without the existence of a captive wildcat ancestor, hybrid cats’ would-be owners must screen their breeders carefully to ensure they receive a healthy, well-socialized animal whose wild parent or grandcat is treated humanely.
“There’s a lot of bad operators out there,” Laura says. “There’s situations where there’s a Savannah cat [for sale], and it seems too good to be true. So we looked really hard to find a reputable breeding operation … someone who’s responsible and cares about the cats.”
They found their breeder in Traverse City, Michigan, after meeting other cats who got along well with humans and owners who’d had positive experiences. One of Sekhmet’s cousins is so well-acclimated to human contact that he works as a therapy cat.
Sekhmet’s name, which is printed in hieroglyphs on her food dish, is a tribute to the way she completed their home after Kitty’s death.
“Sekhmet is the Egyptian lion goddess” of protection, battle and medicine, David says. Their Sekhmet “is a pretty fierce cat. She loves to play and pounce, but [the ancient] Sekhmet was a warrior and a healer. We like that duality.”
“Party Animals” and Angie
The van Leersums, Hartig and Lindley, the Mosers and the Arnolds all successfully reordered their lives around animals who require special accommodation. Not all adopters manage it.
Just like cats and dogs, exotics get abandoned, surrendered to shelters, returned to pet stores or removed from their owners’ care by authorities. Cincinnati Animal CARE spokeswoman Lisa Colina says the organization rehomes a few dozen “other” category animals each year, including wolf-dogs, tarantulas, rats and snakes.
Angie Tucker’s “party animals” — the collection of reptiles, amphibians and arachnids who share Tucker’s Amelia home — are pet store returns and oddball rescues adopted after rejections by previous owners.
Unlike the other adopters who spoke to CityBeat, Tucker had no preexisting yen for the creatures whose terraria now occupy a full wall of her family’s living room.
She just felt sorry for Nubs, a bearded dragon whose missing foreleg hurt her chances of finding a home.
“About three years ago, I got to work at a local pet store for a little bit, part-time,” Tucker says. “And people kept coming and bringing animals back, surrendering them. They were all missing a limb or, you know, something went on.
“[Pet stores] call them unsellables. If there’s something wrong with them, they’re damaged goods.”
She had a basic understanding of reptile care and a starter set of equipment from the store when she volunteered to adopt the “unsellable” beardie. Learning more about her charges and their needs has been the best part of tending to the expanding menagerie, she says.
“If I saw a snake coming four years ago, I would’ve probably run the other way,” Tucker says. “But the more I’ve learned, the more I’ve learned to trust them. They really do bring you joy and knowledge. The ongoing education … I mean, at my age, you think you know it all. And then I got into this and thought, ‘Wow. I have so much to learn.’”
Now she drapes her ball python over her shoulders like a feather boa, wears press-on nails to complement photos of her vinegaroons and lets two Russian tortoises, Koopa and Bowser, follow her around the house.
And Nubs is a sought-after star. Tucker’s critters travel around Greater Cincinnati as Tucker’s Party Animals, a rental service giving event crowds a chance to hold, feed and take pictures with previously unloved animals.
“We do a lot of birthday parties,” Tucker says. “Kids really like it. Even in the 14-to-15-year-old age range, they like the animals, and they love that they can take selfies.”
Because so many of these animals had already been displaced by the time they met her, and because almost all of them have captive lifespans measured in decades, Tucker is careful to ensure that those who live longest have other homes waiting in the likely event they outlast her.
Statistically, Nubs will probably live to see at least a 16th birthday. Most ball pythons make it past 30, as do many tarantulas. Koopa and Bowser may have more than 50 years of lettuce-chomping ahead.
“We do have to will the tortoises to someone,” she says. “We have a son and a grandson, and we’re hoping to live long enough that the grandson can take over [their care]. Our girls don’t seem interested, but they do joke about it. ‘You know, Mom, we’ll be fighting over your turtles after you’re gone.’”
Rosie, Ramona, Percy and Hannah
Seven-year-old Rosie the skunk “just kind of fell into my lap” after another owner surrendered her, Cincinnati Parks botanist Hannah Fitz says. Observing the little creature’s glossy coat, roly-poly tummy and sweet temperament, one wonders how Fitz ever finds the heart to push her off.
“She’s basically a stuffed animal,” Fitz confirms. “She loves to be held. I’ve got a whole arsenal of baby carriers to wear around the house or when I take her to Findlay Market. [Her baby sister] Ramona went with me to BLINK.”
Rosie’s first owner — who still gets regular photo updates from Fitz — knew she was a charmer, too. When she realized that Rosie could no longer stay in her home, she contacted Cincinnati Parks to find a new home that allowed her to remain in contact with human beings.
“Rosie’s former mother had reached out to see if one of the nature buildings [at Parks] would want to add her to the collection for interacting with kids,” Fitz says. “But nobody’s there on the weekends, so they weren’t able to. My friend Joe called me and said, ‘Hey, Hannah. Do you want a skunk?’”
Of course she did.
Fitz acquired her five cats and two other skunks, Percy and Ramona Flowers, in similarly serendipitous ways. Rehomed plants and repurposed pieces of decor fill the small clan’s CUF home, where the trio of skunks cuddle on the couch and build blanket nests in the cabinets. In the upstairs “skunk room,” they chase treats around a pond liner that Fitz reshaped into a ball pit. All three are curious, mischievous and sociable.
“They’re just little double-wide ferrets,” she says.
Of all the species shared with CityBeat this month, the striped skunk has had the most tempestuous historical relationship with human beings. Rosie’s kindred have occupied every quadrant of Serpell’s affection-utility chart — in turns useful and useless, despised and treasured — without ever changing their stripes.
The earliest written description of a skunk is a rebuke from French Jesuit priest Paul le Jeune, who encountered the species on a mission in North America during the 1640s. He described it to readers of The Jesuit Relations as follows:
“I mention it here, not on account of its excellence, but to make of it a symbol of sin. … It has black fur, quite beautiful and shining; and has upon its back two perfectly white stripes, which join near the neck and tail, making an oval which adds greatly to their grace. … But it is so stinking, and casts so foul an odor, that it is unworthy of being called the dog of Pluto. No sewer ever smelled so bad. I would not have believed it if I had not smelled it myself.”
Skunk farming nevertheless became a lucrative trade in the New World, where the fur le Jeune admired could be fashioned into hats and coats, and Americans in the early 20th century found the little omnivores useful as pest control. In 1961, a contributor to The Iowa State Veterinarian wrote that a domestic skunk “makes a pet which is safe, lovable and above all novel and exclusive.”
The rabies panic of the late century, however, tanked what popularity they’d accrued, and today only 17 states allow for the legal possession of mephitis mephitis.
Le Jeune might be mollified to learn all 17 require that pet skunks be de-scented. Rosie and her siblings each went to a veterinarian as kits to have their scent glands — the two anal sacs that produce a skunk’s sulfurous defensive spray — removed. De-scented skunks still smell musky, like their ferret cousins, but can’t mark up their home, spray intruders or fight fire with fire in a skunk-on-skunk dispute.
The operation is safe, quick and considered “not very invasive,” per Mariemont vet Zola, who compares it to “a more technically difficult spay-neuter.”
(“The procedure is often done outdoors for obvious reasons,” Zola adds.)
However, it creates a permanent ethical imperative for the owner. A skunk that can’t fend off predators with spray is a skunk that will need a human caretaker for the rest of its life.
Fitz says she’s happy to shoulder the responsibility. Her home is baby-proofed to keep her three curious charges safe, and she devotes considerable effort — sometimes to the point of exhaustion — to ensuring they stay safe, healthy and entertained.
Owning her skunks “does limit my ability to move in the future,” Fitz says. Her pets could move with her to Indiana, but they become contraband at the Ohio-Kentucky border. And caring for her animals requires patience, accommodation and understanding from her friends and family. “But I just want to give them the best life that I possibly can.”
This story is featured in CityBeat’s March 5 print edition.
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