The serval, the sugar glider and the tapir are legal pets in the Netherlands, I read. I had to google it, but a sugar glider is a cute, tiny marsupial with fly skin that allows it to float. The serval is a large feline resembling a lynx and the tapir – not to be confused with the anteater – is a solitary animal, devoid of social behavior, which can only defend itself by running away.
Immediately I saw myself on a rainy Monday morning rather grumpy walking the antisocial tapir, hoping that the pee would come soon. The legal pet would be so startled by a popping exhaust that the antisocial tapir would run away, walking me, instead of the other way around.
Why can you have a tapir as a pet? Because even in the rules-crazy Netherlands, the rules makers sometimes get in their way, so that the rules cannot be drawn up. Long story short: only after two independent committees have considered it, a definitive list of ‘House and Hobby animals’ can be compiled, with all animal species that may be kept. There will be a ‘transitional arrangement’ for keepers of animals that are not on that definitive list and…
Anyway, you understand: the purple crocodile is the only animal that has so far been on the list of ‘Household and Hobby Animals’.
Another thing: when I hear the word hobby animal I always think of an animal with a hobby. A bobbin lace kangaroo, for example, or a tap-dancing tapir. It always takes a while to realize that a kangaroo does not have a hobby, but is a hobby. Then I wonder what you can actually do with a kangaroo, as a hobby? Nothing. You can at most keep a few things in it.
At the moment about 260 different animals are kept in the Netherlands. They are already on a list on the site of the national government. I looked at it for a while and spontaneously got a zoonosis. In these times of corona, an Egyptian spiny mouse is immediately suspicious, right? Just as the Tanzanian grass rat, the Siberian jerboa, the Somali hedgehog and the Chinese dwarf hamster should be blacklisted by their country of origin alone.
We keep animals in the Netherlands that I didn’t even know existed. The black-backed agouti? The African pygmy dormice, which in terms of disturbance of public order is not inferior to its big brother, the dormouse. What is a desert warthog and how do you get rid of it? The bongo. The Lesser Kudu, The Greater Kudu. The brown bear.
Guard. The brown bear? Yes. The brown bear. That too is still a pet.
Or an animal with a dark hobby.