Tips for saving for pet owners...

...or would be pet owners.

Jonesy offers the tip:

"Rescue your pets, don't buy purebreds. They will be better pets anyway."

Jonesy's supporting argument:

And Holly explores pet ownership in great detail.

My family's pet, Bilbo:

I have a pet squirrel that lives in my basement. And last summer I had a family of pet skunks living under my front porch. By pets, in this case, I mean "beasts that torment me."

Squirrels moments before they pried open the suet feeder and robbed a couple of woodpeckers of many scrumptious meals:


I actually did get rid of the animals without paying hundreds for pest removal. With the squirrel, I left the bulkhead open until it got hungry and found its way out (to the bird feeders) and then I sealed up the hole that the squirrel had made (to help me ventilate the basement) with some old bricks I had in the back yard.

With the skunk family (we saw at least three), after several nights of odoriferous entertainment, I simply started filling in the hole they made (to help ventilate the space under my porch). They would dig out or dig back in, depending on where they were when I filled in the hole and share their skunky smell to let me know how much fun they were having re-digging the hole. I did not try and permanently seal it up, because I did not know if they were under there when I was closing the hole and I did not want to trap them under my house. After a few days no new hole appeared so I determined the skunk was skulking off somewhere else and dug deep around the porch- I could then see up into the "den" and saw it was empty. I buried bricks in the ground so that the hole could not be easily re-opened.

I could have paid hundreds to have the skunks trapped and removed, but I paid nothing and have not been bothered again (yet!).

Ok, ok- pest removal has nothing to do with pet ownership, but my beta fish swam off to the great sea out west a while ago and the only "pets" I have now are the coyotes, foxes and hawks that live nearby (maybe there are other reasons the squirrels and skunks are not bothering me anymore).

Coyote sitting in my backyard in broad daylight: