When my daughter was living in Petoskey there was a fire in her apartment. Nobody was home at the time except for a dog and a cat. A neighbor saw the smoke and called the firefighters, who were there in a matter of minutes and quickly extinguished the blaze. After they left, the neighbor saw the dog wandering around outside looking confused. They managed to catch the dog and keep it safe until my daughter got home. The cat was an inside cat, I don't think it had ever been outdoors in its life. My daughter stayed someplace else that night and came back to assess the damage the next day. She found the cat, alive and unharmed, hiding in the closet that had been its sanctuary whenever the dog was being a pain in the ass. The firemen had busted the door, so the cat could have gotten out as easily as the dog, but it had stayed in that closet through all the commotion and even unto the next day. A veterinarian once told me that, when a cat is sick or injured, it will typically go off by itself to either recover or die alone. Dogs, on the other hand will usually seek human contact when they are in distress. If they can't find their owner, any other human will do in a pinch.
There were garter snakes in our neighborhood too. We would catch them, handle them, and scare the girls with them, but we didn't keep them captive for any length of time. Fun fact: According to the Bible, the reason girls are afraid of snakes is because Satan appeared to Eve in the form of a serpent when he persuaded her to eat the forbidden fruit and share it with Adam.
I found the article about Hetty Green to be interesting but I forgot to mention it in my last post.
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