Gus Ben David, director of the 
Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary and owner of the World of Reptiles and Birds, both in Edgartown, is known for keeping a wide range of strange and rare animals, from enormous African toads to albino climbing snakes. But Ben David is not the only Islander to keep animals that are not typical pets. Here are four stories of unusual animals living with their owners at private homes on Martha’s Vineyard.

My three sons

People often think the three alpacas owned by Drs. Deurward Hughes and Terry Kriedman are llamas. Though both alpacas and llamas are camelids (as are vicunas, camels, and guanacos), llamas have larger ears, while alpacas have proportionately longer necks. Llamas weigh about 450 pounds apiece; alpacas are unlikely to grow larger than 150.
    
“In an emergency,” says Kriedman, “you can fit an alpaca into the back of an SUV, though when you do, the whole Island knows about it.”  
    
The two males (Rusty Wellington and Quincy Jones) were about nine months old when they arrived on the 
Island in a Cadillac SUV. (They fit because they “cush” – fold their legs beneath them and rest on their bellies). That summer, the breeders from the Acorn Alpaca  ranch in Millis brought a one-year-old named Danielson to the Agricultural Fair, and, says Kriedman, “he just came home with us. Deurward thought he was really handsome. So now we have three boys. I call them My Three Sons.”
    
While the doctors considered showing and breeding their alpacas, especially after Rusty won first place in a show in Springfield, they eventually decided that breeding was more than they could do in their West Tisbury backyard, and showing was too logistically complicated by trailers and ferries. So in the end, Quincy, Rusty, and Danny are just pets.
    
What does one do with pet alpacas? “Well, mostly we just stare at them a lot,” confesses Kriedman. “I enjoy watching them so much that I come home every day at lunch just to look at them, and then I go back to work.” Alpacas are funny animals, she says. They have a highly developed herd mentality – they’re always doing the same thing at the same time. They eat in a row, and they stand and look in the same direction, with their heads all pointed just the same way.
    
“A lot of people come to see them,” says Kriedman, “and we encourage this because it’s good for the animals to be exposed to people.” When new people come into the pen, all three alpacas – displaying an inquisitiveness typical of their breed – come over to sniff the newcomers’ faces. They don’t like unknown dogs, however. When frightened, the alpacas let out a screech that Kriedman says sounds “just like an alarm going off.”
  
Alpacas, which can live as long as twenty years, are native to mountainous regions of several South American countries. “Every winter,” says Kriedman, “we say, ‘What’s wrong with you guys? You’re supposed to like snow.’ The minute it snows, they head for the shed.”
    
The alpacas eat grass in spring, summer, and fall; second-cut hay in winter; and a half a cup of grain twice daily. They go to the bathroom in the same place, which makes for easy removal (and excellent compost).  Once a month the animals are wormed, and the vet visits once a year. “We probably spend more money taking care of our dogs,” says Kriedman.
    
Once a month, the animals’ toenails need cutting, which is a challenge. 
Alpacas detest having their feet touched, perhaps because – as prey animals for whom fleeing is essential – they are 
protective of their trotters. And when these animals are annoyed, they spit. “You can hear the spit coming up,” says Kriedman, “and you really want to get out of the way, because it smells terrible.”
    
Once a year, the alpacas are shorn. Shearing can also be complicated when the animals are feeling uncooperative; last year, it took an hour per pet. But the fleece is soft, warm, woolly, and prized for making sweaters and scarves. The doctors have several garments made from their own animals’ fleece.
    Alpacas don’t like to be petted, but Kriedman’s figured out how to kiss them without getting spit at. “I’m not,” she declares, “going to have a pet I can’t kiss.”

Sir dodgy 
huffington

In England, gardeners love to have hedgehogs on their property because they eat slugs, snails, and other pesky bugs. So prized are they that a British hedgehog hospital has been built to care for wild hedgehogs that get hurt or sick.
    
Pet hedgehogs can be delightful. Cute little critters with faces right out of Beatrix Potter, hedgehogs are highly inquisitive and love to play with toys and balls. They enjoy climbing as well as burrowing into dark, secret places.
    
“Some hedgehogs love to be loved,” says Keith Jackson, an Island veterinary technician who has owned an African pygmy hedgehog named Sir Dodgy Huffington for five months. Although hedgehogs don’t like to be with other hedgehogs, if an owner gets one when it’s very young (which Jackson didn’t), an affectionate bond can develop between owner and pet. “On the other hand,” adds Jackson wryly, “some hedgehogs are just hedgehogs. Mine is just a hedgehog.”
    
Now nine months old, Sir Dodgy is six inches long and weighs about three-quarters of a pound. He lives on a diet of cat food and mealworms. His body is covered in quills that Jackson says are quite sharp. Unlike porcupines, hedgehogs don’t throw their quills, but twice a year, they shed them and grow new ones, and during this time, they can be quite irritable. In Sir Dodgy’s case, Jackson says, this mood is nothing new.
    
“Basically,” Jackson says resignedly, “all he does is huff.” Huffing (the activity for which this pet was named) is what hedgehogs do when they’re frightened or annoyed. By contracting certain muscles and exhaling loudly, the animals curl up to become little balls of pointy spines – not exactly a friendly posture.
    
“I got him because I’ve always been interested in the exotic pets,” says Jackson. “I used to have ferrets. I thought hedgehogs were interesting little creatures. The breeder said this hedgehog was really sweet, but he hasn’t been sweet to me at all. He really doesn’t like me.”
    
Hedgehogs, which live up to seven years in captivity and are legal to own only in certain states, arrive wrapped in what’s called a “hedgie bag” – a couple of layers of thick fabric sewn together. If the bag is kept in an animal’s cage, the hedgehog will often burrow into it for privacy. Sir Dodgy spends much of the daytime in his hedgie bag, exhibiting the nocturnal tendencies typical of the species. Nonetheless, Jackson does let him out of the cage to run around from time to time, and he is cute to watch.
    
“Hedgehogs are probably great pets,” says Jackson, “if they aren’t evil like mine.”

A snake named Samantha

When you’re buying frozen rodents, do it from a reputable breeder. This is one of those tidbits of information that Ernie Dewing, a forty-four-year-old reptile lover and musician who lives on Chappaquiddick, can surprise you with. Reputable breeders are those who raise rodents specifically for feeding to other pets, which makes them less likely to make your carnivore ill.
    
Dewing has a ten-foot, fifteen-year-old Syrian red-tailed boa constrictor named Samantha, which currently weighs fifty pounds. But Samantha may live to be as old as fifty, by which point she’ll be twice as long and weigh twice as much. She’ll also be more beautiful, since aging brings out the brightness of the red in her leopard-like markings.
    
“A lot of people who get snakes like this don’t realize how big they’ll get,” says Dewing, who knows all about them (this is his tenth big snake). If, say, your boa starts to strangle you, simply start from its tail, its weakest point, and unravel it. “It’s pretty easy to get out,” he says.
  
“Some people are phobic about snakes,” he adds. His own mother was “deathly afraid” of them when he was growing up, until one of them got sick and she had to help feed it medicine with an eyedropper and give it steam treatments in the shower, which cured her fear. “Some of my parents’ friends still don’t like coming over,” he says, “so we throw a blanket over the cage.”
    
Dewing himself has always been fascinated by snakes. “They’re very sensitive,” he says. If he’s in a bad mood or afraid, Samantha senses it and gets tense; when he’s relaxed, so is she.
    
Snakes are easy to care for. Dewing feeds Samantha once every two to three weeks, thawing one of those frozen dinners from the freezer. He orders them in batches of ten on the Internet. His last order was a bunch of “colossal rats” weighing five pounds each, but Samantha also eats guinea pigs and small chickens. The biggest advantage of frozen food for snakes, Dewing points out, is that the meal doesn’t put up a struggle, so it’s unlikely to damage the snake during dinner. Samantha, who is probably worth about $500, is considered something of a collector’s item, and Dewing doesn’t want her scarred.
    
Dewing’s interaction with his snake is fairly minimal. Sometimes he takes her out of her cage and carries her around his neck, but her size makes it difficult to get her back into the aquarium if she doesn’t feel like returning. “She seems to do fine without any physical attention,” he says. “As long as she’s fed and warm, she’s okay.”
    
“I love my dog a lot more,” Dewing confesses. “There’s really no comparison, because I’m not emotionally attached to Samantha. You can’t connect to a snake the way you can with a dog.”

Sinbad the biker cat

What’s so unusual about a cat? When it comes to this one, almost everything. She swims, for starters, since her breed – the rare Turkish Van cat – evolved around Lake Van in the center of Turkey, where fishing was the best way for a cat to find supper.
    
Technically, Sinbad is not an Island cat. But like her sailor namesake, she is not averse to sea travel, regularly taking the ferry to get here. Sinbad and her owner, fifty-seven-year-old neuroscientist and physicist Patrick Gunkel, live in Woods Hole on a street too busy for Sinbad to be allowed out of the house safely. Gunkel, who has owned the eighteen-year-old cat since she was two, knows that she loves the outdoors. And so about every five days in the off-season, he and Sinbad travel to the Island, with Gunkel reading in a chair on the passenger deck and Sinbad sitting in the window well next to him, looking out. Once here, they set out by bicycle to find new trails to explore, with Sinbad riding on the shoulders of her owner as he pedals his bike along the Island’s roads.
    
Like most others of her breed, Sinbad is all white except for brownish markings on her head and tail. From a distance, she looks like a fur stole around her owner’s neck. The shoulder-riding evolved from Gunkel’s carrying her in his backpack on the steeper slopes of their walks. One day years ago, she climbed out of the pack and stood on Gunkel’s shoulders, demonstrating remarkable balance; Turkish Van cats are known for both agility and love of heights.
    
They are also known for their curiosity and playfulness, and two Van cat websites note the cats’ tendency to “wreak havoc amongst household ornaments and furnishings.” Sinbad’s first owners, some University of Texas college students who lived next door to Gunkel, took to locking her in a closet when they were out during the day because they grew tired of coming home and finding their knickknacks knocked to the floor. Gunkel had met the cat; one day he opened his apartment door, and she strolled in, cased the joint, and left. He had never liked cats but didn’t know why. Learning that her owners wanted to give her up, he decided to adopt her as a 
scientific experiment.
    
“Within three days, my prejudice had evaporated,” he says. “It taught me how shallow prejudice really is.”
    
Sinbad is an intelligent animal. Gunkel is convinced that when they explore Martha’s Vineyard, she knows when they’ve found a new place. “We’ve probably traveled a few thousand miles of paths,” says Gunkel. “When we find a new one, she’ll stand up on my shoulder and lean forward. She recognizes a novel place. The extent of her knowledge of her environment is extraordinary.”
    
It is also Gunkel’s belief that animals have what we think of as human feelings and thoughts: “They are there,” he says, “only more dimly.”
    
Certainly, the bond between Gunkel and Sinbad is deep. She plays with him, executing such stunts as a several-foot leap into the air to tap him on the face with a paw, followed by a dash to another part of the room from which to survey him with a “Gotcha!” expression on her face. She loves being thrown up in the air and caught, and Gunkel sometimes performs this feat for groups of children in Woods Hole. The two wrestle and play cat and mouse with one another.
    
Gunkel builds dens for Sinbad all over his house – beer boxes padded with soft beds of grass or leaves. “Cats like to move from one secret place to another,” Gunkel explains. “She’s got about seven of them.” He’s also learned that Sinbad enjoys classical music, of which he has a serious collection. “I’ve discovered what her tastes are,” he says. When she likes a piece, she’ll go sit near a speaker, flit her ears, and stay still longer than usual. “She likes the schmaltzy things,” Gunkel says with a laugh, “like Chopin waltzes and Tchaikovsky,” although he notes that she enjoys certain more difficult pieces as well.
    
“I would do almost anything for Sinbaddie,” Gunkel says. “I do it because of kindness.” If you want to be kind to Gunkel and Sinbad, Gunkel says, please respect their privacy when you spot them riding around the Island. Often, Gunkel is developing scientific theories or doing complicated mathematical equations in his head while he rides, and he prefers not to be interrupted. That 
being said, he has been pleased on 
occasion to be stopped by elderly people who tell him how much it means to them to see him riding with his cat. “I think they understand,” he says, “the idea that we are underscoring in an important way the importance of kindness. I believe that kindness is everything.”