When people think of pets, they usually think of dogs, cats, maybe even hamsters. However, many people within the Aragon community have different, more uncommon pets. From chickens and llamas, to snakes and quails, there is certainly a variety of animals people have at home.
Biology and Advanced Placement Environmental Science teacher Greg Moretti, has acquired goats, a llama, mantises, Coturnix quails, chickens, fish, geckos and chickens over the years.
“Being a biology teacher, I’ve always been interested in living things,” Moretti said. “All of the farm animals [were from] friends that were moving and couldn’t keep their farm animals anymore. We had the room for them, so that’s when that whole farm animal experiment started. I always had a lot of pets when I was a kid, too.”
Many of his animals entered his family in unexpected ways, such as his Coturnix quails over the pandemic.
“[The quails were] keeping our neighbors up at night,“ Moretti said. “The sheriff eventually had to come out and tell the other neighbors who had the quail that they had to get rid of them. Instead of doing the right thing, they just opened the door to their quail pen and released them into the neighborhood … On Saturday morning, my kids came running in the house and said, ‘Daddy, we found this bird,’ and I went out there and it was a quail … My kids spent the morning running around the neighborhood capturing all these quails. We ended up [raising] them, and we just changed the ratio of males to females. They stopped being noisy … [A] few of them are still alive.”
Moretti finds inherent joy in taking care of his many pets.
“I find it relaxing to take care of them,” Moretti said. “It sounds like it would be a chore, but I like coming into my classroom early in the morning and checking on everybody and taking care of my critters at home. Working out in the fields with the goats and the chickens is relaxing to me, so I enjoy it. And my kids love being able to grow up around a lot of animals.”
Moretti’s uncommon pet journey is not finished yet.
“If anybody has an unusual animal that needs rescuing, they can come talk to me,” Moretti said. “I might be willing to take on a new pet or find it a new home.”
Drama teacher and director Shane Smuin had a corn snake, Smokey, named after her smoke-like appearance.
“I am very allergic to anything with fur, so I can’t have pets like cats and dogs,” Smuin said. “We called the Humane Society, and they said they had a corn snake that needed to be rescued. And so we rescued our Smokey. When we got her, she was maybe a few days old … She was really, really tiny.”
Smokey died early before she could reach her full twenty-year lifespan.
“One day, I was chilling out on a Sunday morning, and she started thrashing around in the cage so hard that she broke her jaw,” Smuin said. “There was blood everywhere. We took her to the vet, and on the way to the vet, she started thrashing again in the little carrying cage. The vet was like, ‘We have no idea.’ The safest, most humane thing to do was let her go.”
