When I was a kid, we would walk downtown on Saturdays to Woolworths. I’d always make my way to a small corner in the basement where the store kept a rather pathetic stock of hamsters, turtles, birds, and an occasional kitten or puppy.
My sisters and I had a variety of pets over the years, which died pretty quickly and were buried in the yard. Considering our track record with those pets, it’s fortunate that I never responded to any of the then-common ads for exotic pets. While the ads in this week’s Scanning Around with Gene may surprise younger readers, it wasn’t very long ago that rules related to animal sales were considerably looser than they are today.
According to Katherine C. Grier in her book Pets in America, the mail-order pet business began in the late 1800s and peaked in the late 1950s when both the Sears and Spiegel catalogs offered full complements of pets, including 46 breeds of dogs, de-scented skunks, birds of every sort, and even small ponies and burros. Here is an image from the 1958 Spiegel catalog, followed by an ad for pet skunks from True magazine in 1955. Sadly, for those skunks the “Trails End Zoo Company” wasn’t quite the end of the line.
Monkeys make poor pets, I’m told, but that didn’t stop mail-order merchandisers from offering the creatures for sale. These monkeys would be shipped in a box with enough food and water to survive the trip, supposedly, but remember, this was before FedEx and Express Mail. The first ad is from 1967 and suggests that monkeys eat “the same food as you” and even like lollipops!
And while Sears may have sold mail-order dogs across America, Dean Studios, a photo-processing laboratory, gave away miniature dogs as a gimmick for ordering photographic reproductions. Here, from 1956, is an ad followed by a close-up of the more interesting copy. Seems these poor little dogs bark just like big dogs, only you can store them in a shoebox.
Sea life has also been a point of interest for mail-order purveyors, as seen in this ad for live seahorses from a 1963 issue of Family Circle magazine.
You’re probably familiar with Sea Monkeys, the small brine shrimp that amazingly hatch into life and are still sold, along with many fancy accessories. The Sea Monkey craze was started in 1960 as the brainchild of inventor and nature-lover Harold von Braunhut.
According to the official Sea Monkey Website, “all testing is safe, humane and performed at Montauk Marine Sciences Laboratory by highly qualified micro-crustacean scientists devoted to studying these miraculous and often misunderstood creatures. A true wonder of nature, Artemia salina have been used for years in biological studies worldwide by scientists. The Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys does not support or condone any experiments or research outside of their research facilities in the Montauk Marine Sciences Laboratory.”
I can also assure you that no Sea Monkeys were harmed in the creation of this column.
It’s easy to look at some of these ads and find them amusing, but of course most of these poor animals didn’t survive very long, and the death rate during shipping was very high. We are, thankfully, more enlightened these days, at least in regards to the treatment of pets. Just don’t get me started on large-scale agribusiness animal farming. We are clearly less enlightened when it comes to animals used as food.
And the Winner Is….
Congratulations to Patricia Ward of Ward’s Printing in St. Joseph, Missouri, who is the randomly selected winner in my album-cover contest. Patricia will be getting a customized package of “goodies” from my archives. Thanks to everyone who submitted their favorite album cover designs.
This article was last modified on May 17, 2023
This article was first published on May 1, 2009
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