7 peculiar pets in history: From a beer-drinking elk to the Pope’s elephant

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You cannot legally keep a tiger in your backyard in the United States, and across much of the country you cannot keep a bear, a monkey, or an elephant either. Roughly, 20 states ban private possession of large carnivores and primates outright, and the Big Cat Public Safety Act banned the private ownership of big cats in December 2022.

However, no such rules existed for most of history, mainly because almost nobody was in a position to enforce them. 

1. A gold laxative killed the pope’s elephant in 1516

King Manuel I of Portugal sent an Indian elephant to Rome in 1514, a gift for the newly elected Pope Leo X and the first the city had seen until then. Leo was besotted with it.

The elephant, Hanno, fell ill two years later. Leo’s physicians diagnosed constipation and prescribed a laxative containing gold, then a fashionable remedy. 

Unfortunately, the laxative killed Hanno when he was just seven years old, very young for an elephant. Leo commissioned a memorial fresco from the renowned Italian painter Raphael, and wrote his beloved elephant’s epitaph himself. 

Leo buried Hanno in the Belvedere courtyard, today part of the Vatican Museum in Vatican City. Leo wrote, from Hanno’s perspective, “Under this great hill, I lie buried,” and goes on to say “in my brutish beast they perceived human feelings.”

In February 1962, workers installing a heating system hit a tooth and several pieces of jawbone. Their first guess of what creature they had found? A dinosaur. 

It took a Smithsonian historian three decades to prove the bones did, in fact, belong to Leo’s famous elephant. Hanno’s bones had been lying a few feet under the Vatican Museum’s busiest courtyard, forgotten, for over 400 years. 

2. A Mughal ruler had a thousand cheetahs in the 16th century

The Mughal emperor Akbar, who ruled northern India from 1556 to 1605, trained hundreds of cheetahs to hunt Indian antelopes called blackbucks. No ruler has ever matched Akbar’s cheetah coalition (Yes, a group of cheetahs is called coalition).

That sounds unmanageable until you look at the animal. A cheetah belongs to its own genus—not to the big cat genus of lions and tigers you’d perhaps expect. It cannot roar but instead purrs. Its claws are blunt and only half-retractable, better for traction than damage, and its teeth are small for its size. 

Everything about cheetahs is built for a 30-second sprint. If the big cat gets hurt and cannot run, then their livelihood is at risk: A cheetah that cannot run cannot eat. So cheetahs avoid fights they might lose.  

That temperament made the cheetahs manageable hunting companions in 16th century India. An illustration from Akbarnama, Akbar’s official chronicle, shows how a hunt worked: a cheetah released from the bullock cart pulls down a full-grown blackbuck, while a keeper holds a second cheetah blindfolded. 

Keepers took the cheetahs from the wild and blindfolded them like hunting falcons to keep cheetahs calm until the chase. The keepers carried each cheetah to the field and released the cat only when a blackbuck came within range. This was because a cheetah can hold its sprint for only a few hundred yards and has to make the kill before they run out of steam. 

Akbar rewarded the cheetahs deemed the best hunters. One such cheetah, called Chitr Nanjan, was so skilled that Akbar awarded it a jeweled collar and had drums beaten in its honor. 

Across a reign of nearly 50 years, Akbar kept about 1000 cheetahs at a time, according to India’s Kuno Cheetah Conservancy.  Akbar and his big cat wranglers bred almost none of the cheetahs in the emperor’s menagerie, since cheetahs breed poorly in captivity. 

The one exception came in 1613, when cheetahs kept by Akbar’s son Jahangir produced a litter. No other litter was recorded anywhere else for three centuries. 

However, several centuries after Akbar’s reign, cheetahs started to vanish in the subcontinent. After decades of hunting India’s cheetahs were officially declared extinct in 1952, and the country is now importing cheetahs from Africa to start over.

3. An elk that got drunk and died in 1591

Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who measured the sky more precisely than anyone before him, was something of a character. He wore a prosthetic nose after losing his own in a duel over a math problem. He employed a supposed clairvoyant man named Jepp. And he also kept a tame elk.

Brahe recorded the elk’s death in his letters, which the French philosopher Pierre Gassendi retold decades later. When Brahe lent his elk out to entertain a nobleman, the elk drank too much beer, fell down the staircase, and died. No one has documented the exact sequence of events that led to the elk’s death—but needless to say it was something of a bender.

4. A French empress’s orangutan dined at the dinner table in the early 19th century

French empress Josephine de Beauharnais, the first wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, kept kangaroos, emus, and black swans in the grounds at Château de Malmaison, a private country retreat in France. 

But inside Château de Malmaison, she kept a young female orangutan. General Decean, the governor-general of French Indies at that time, gifted her the primate in 1808. 

Guests described the orangutan sitting at the dinner table in a white chemise, using a knife and fork. The orangutan lasted about a year in the French climate. 

After its death, Josephine sent the orangutan’s body to the naturalist Georges-Frederic Cuvier, who used it for an early scientific description of the species.

5. Lord Byron’s pet bear at Cambridge University

In October 1807, Lord Byron wrote from Trinity College, Cambridge, to his friend Elizabeth Pigot about a splendid new companion: a tame bear. Asked what he meant to do with the animal, he said he had proposed that it “sit for a fellowship.” At the time, a fellowship was a senior, salaried post held by the academics who governed the college. 

The story goes Byron most likely chose a bear because Trinity’s statutes banned undergraduates from keeping dogs, but said nothing about bears. 

Where the bear actually lived is even murkier. Popular imagination has Byron walking the bear around the college on a chain. But according to the book Byron and Trinity: Memorials, Marbles and Ruins, the bear was “in a stable in the Ram Yard.” It also says, “it is highly improbable to say the least that the College authorities would then have tolerated a bear in the College.”

6. Florence Nightingale’s pocket owl 

Four years before the Crimean War made her famous for her nursing, Florence Nightingale was in Athens, Greece, where she came across children abusing a baby owl. Nightingale bought the bird off them, named it Athena, and carried it in her pocket for the next four years.  

Athena was found dead in the attic around the time Nightingale left for the war in 1855. Florence took it hard. The line “poor little beastie, it was odd how much I loved you” is recorded in the book Nightingale’s sister Parthenope authored about Athena. 

Nightingale had the owl stuffed, which is still on display at the Florence Nightingale Museum in London, England. Parthenope made the little illustrated book in 1855 to cheer Nightingale up while she was ill in Crimea. 

The book includes the fate of Plato, a cicada Nightingale had also kept as a pet. It reads, “Athena conveniently ate the Cicala, thereby consolidating two pets in one.”

7. A tire magnate gifts a pet pygmy hippo to President Calvin Coolidge 

In 1927, Harvey Firestone, the tire magnate, sent President Calvin Coolidge a pygmy hippopotamus named Billy. “Baby Hippo for Coolidge is Coming From Liberia,” The New York Times announced in May 1927. 

Workers at the Firestone Tire and Rubber Plantation company in Liberia captured Billy. Firestone gifted the creature to Coolidge, who then gave the hippo to the National Zoo in Washington D.C. in June 1927.

At the time, Billy was one of only about eight pygmy hippos living in the United States and nobody knew much about the species at that time.

But Billy turned out to be an exceptional breeder. The hippo fathered 23 calves, each nicknamed Gumdrop and numbered in sequence. Enough of those calves went to other collections that most pygmy hippos in American zoos descend from Billy. Keepers noticed something else: Almost every surviving calf was female. Captive pygmy hippos still skew that way, and scientists haven’t really been able to determine why.

While stories like Billy’s might seem charming, they rarely did the animals any good. What made these animals seem worth owning—rare, exotic, out of place—is exactly what made them so difficult to keep alive. Today, the exotic animal laws exist for a reason: taking wild animals from their homes rarely ends well for the animals. 

In That Time When, Popular Science tells the weirdest, surprising, and little-known stories that shaped science, engineering, and innovation.

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