7 Badass Animals Presidents Have Kept As Pets

[THUNDER HANDS]

#7. Josiah the Badger

President: Theodore Roosevelt



For most Americans, when the president comes to town they dress up in their best red, white and blue, wave a miniature stars and stripes and hope the most powerful leader in the western world will give 'em a smile.

But in 1903, one little girl--perhaps the most awesome little girl ever born--decided to throw a badger.

That's not a metaphor. She threw an actual badger at President Theodore Roosevelt. On one hand, you wonder how she survived the encounter--this was Teddy Roosevelt, after all. Then again, you realize that in Roosevelt's world, a thrown badger was probably a common form of greeting.
Still, badgers are fierce little bastards and one wonders how the little girl was able to even get a hold of one, let alone hurl it at a passing Theodore Roosevelt as his train pulled out of some backwater train station in Kansas. She even managed to yell the critter's name. And so, little Josiah the badger passed from Kansas flatland to White House opulence.

The first family bottle-fed Josiah until he cut his teeth, at which point the badger would zip along White House floors, nipping and biting at the heels of passers-by. It should be noted that getting your heels bitten by a wild badger was the least-violent greeting one could hope for when passing through the Roosevelt White House .


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#4.Billy the Pygmy Hippo

President: Calvin Coolidge



Billy the Pygmy Hippo found his way to the White House via Liberia after he was captured there by Harvey Firestone, maker of Firestone tires. There's a certain irony to capturing and enslaving an animal from a country that was founded by freed slaves from the United States, but we digress...

Firestone believed the pygmy hippo would make a wonderful gift for President Coolidge, already a collector of strange and exotic pets. By the time Billy arrived, Coolidge had amassed an assortment of dogs, birds, a wallaby and a domesticated raccoon named Rebecca, a filthy but favorite pet of the first lady.

But it turned out "pygmy hippo" was a misleading term (no doubt coined by the crooked hippo pet industry) and Billy eventually grew too big to stay at the White House. At this point begins a string of events that would lead Billy to become more influential in the hippo world than Coolidge was among the humans.

First, the Coolidge clan turned him over to the Smithsonian National Zoological Park. He had developed a reputation as being "frisky" and, with zookeepers eager to get their hands on some pygmy hippo baby-batter, he was paired with another hippo, Hannah. The two made lousy parents, culminating in the death of their third child when Hannah rolled over and crushed it.

Like most teenage parents, the two eventually figured out what to do with the kids: let someone else deal with them. In this case, it was zookeepers from across the country. Over the course of the next 25 years, Billy got busy getting busy with Hannah. In all, she gave birth to 15 of his children. While she spent her days being pregnant, Billy continued to sew his wild oats with another hippo gal pal, Matilda, who popped out an additional eight kids.

Zookeepers were able to breed them and breed them some more, to the point that the majority of pygmy hippos in captivity today are direct descendants of Billy. So, not only did he spread his seed across a large chunk of the globe, but he lived until 1955... outliving Coolidge by 23 years. If hippos had high schools, they'd name one after Billy.

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#2.Jefferson's Grizzly Bears

President:

Thomas Jefferson



The grizzly bear, now affectionately known as nature's surprisingly agile killing machine, was discovered by the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark; two men with balls of steel, who were ordered by then president, Thomas Jefferson, to head west to find out just what the hell was out there.

In a grammatically incorrect expedition journal entry, Clark described the first encounter:

"In the evening we saw a Brown or Grisley beare on a sand beech, I went out with one man Geo Drewyer & Killed the bear, which was verry large and a turrible looking animal, which we found verry hard to kill... This animal is the largest of the carnivorous kind I ever saw..."

A keen observation from a serious explorer who can't spell worth shit: This was an animal not to be trifled with. The memo, however, was not sent to Captain Zebulon Pike who headed his own expedition later. He was able to acquire a couple of grizzly bear cubs which he promptly sent to President Jefferson as either a gift or an assassination attempt.

Well aware of the animal's temperament, Jefferson decided to keep the cubs anyway, describing them as "perfectly gentle" with a taste for "Indian bread" and possibly Indians, too. As all good bear cubs do, they grew too big and Jefferson decided to have them shipped to a museum in Philadelphia, storing them in cages on the White House lawn for several months until all the arrangements could be made.

Needless to say, the bears were good and pissed off upon arrival. One broke free and managed to corner the museum owner in the kitchen, upon which the animal was promptly shot dead. They shot the other one dead, too, since once you get into the bear-shooting groove it's actually really hard to stop. They then stuffed both corpses and threw them up for display, probably to serve as an example and a warning to all other bears.

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see whole list here

http://www.cracked.com/article_16965_7-badass-animals-presidents-have-kept-as-pets.html

[NYC_SKP]

1. It's just turrible what happened to those beares.

Just turrible!