[another repost which shows it is possible to love & care about things of
nature around one's house rather than shit bricks & kill everything for
the sake of a couple dollars worth of carrots.]

MARMOTS/GROUNDHOGS AS PETS:

The groundhog you can see in the film GROUNDHOG'S DAY was a more-or-less
trained pet. Though amenable to being held & messed with on-camera, it
nevertheless bit the hell out of Bill Murray who was not very expert in
handling it. The scene where he is making the groundhog use a steering
wheel, what looks like Bill getting bitten is in fact Bill getting bitten.
They kept the scene in since Murray stayed in character. The same
groundhog appeared in a couple other film calling for a Groundhog's Day
sequence, but I forget which.

One of the marmots most often kept in captivity is the hoary marmot. They
are quite common, they thrive in captivity, & thus have even been used as
captive behavioral study models by some researchers. The steppe marmot
is used as a captive-bred fur-baring animal on fur-farms in Russia. The
steppe marmot more closely resembles prairie dogs in that it is not a
mountain animal but prefers the flat steppes where they live in extensive
colonies. American marmots/groundhogs do not live in colonies as do ground
squirrels & prairie dogs, & one rarely sees extensive populations in
finite areas.

When America had much more of a rural population with rural lifestyles,
marmots/woodchucks were much more apt to end up family pets. I found two
websites of general histories that spoke of marmots or woodchucks kept as
pets in Victorian America. Here are some 1937 photos of a family that kept
a pet marmot, very charming:
http://www.hoghaven.com/boy1937.htm
http://www.hoghaven.com/girl1937.htm
http://www.hoghaven.com/man1937.htm
and from the same Hog Haven website, a more recent picture of a
hand-raised orphan groundhog:
http://www.hoghaven.com/bella1.htm
You'll want to noodle around in the whole www.hoghaven.com website which
is delightfully packed with entertaining bits.

The people who run groundhog.com have encouraged groundhogs to live all
around their home. Living in a very rural place they are not actually
restricting what these animals do, so they are still largely wild animals
that have learned to hang out near the farm & trust people. If it were a
more populated region no doubt neighbors would complain about garden-raids
or otherwise have a "must exterminate vermin!" response.

They've included a section on rescues too. The rescue page shows their
own primary rescue now fully grown & sitting in its "owner's" lap. "Owner"
is a stretch since once the groundhog was grown, they let it loose, & it
moved in under the house & merely volunteered to remain a pet, they in no
way kept it from doing whatever it pleased. It gets along well with the
cat -- the cat even goes into the groundhog's tunnel to visit -- & the
groundhog never ceased to come sit in peoples' laps to get treats. The
other groundhogs leave the farm each winter to go hibernate, but looks
like the hand-raised one hibernates in the burrow it made for itself under
the house.

Captive breeding is being done on Vancouver Island to assist in
re-establishing populations of an endangered variety. The volunteers &
workers are lucky to handle young marmots regularly, which seem to be very
friendly, but only photograph at the site of anyone handling a full grown
marmot, it has been sedated. The Vancouver recovery project's stunning
website with great photographs throughout:
http://www.marmots.org
and there's some stuff elsewhere on the net about the Toronto & Calgary
zoo programs to breed this same endangered species in captivity.

There are of course many kinds of marmots, some common, some endangered.
Their dispositions probably vary from type to type, since that's true of
the different varieties of prairie dogs. "The Marmot Burrow" website
which is he
http://www.marmotburrow.ucla.edu/
has a page on how to care for them in captivity:
http://www.marmotburrow.ucla.edu/care.html
The fact that they hibernate is mentioned as a drawback, & the main
recommendation otherwise seems to be a mere "guess" that females make
slightly better pets & even they must be acquired very young. It fails to
note that marmots are usually abandoned when weaned & can already take
care of themselves when pretty small; no one should try to rescue one just
because it's little, it's probably doing fine.

There is an exotic pet farm in Newark Ohio whose personal pets include a
groundhog named Sophia, Lennie the Wonder Prairie Dog, a pet lynx, & much
else. Plus they do sell these exotics to the public, hopefully not
willynilly since much of what they offer make really crappy pets.

There are many other pet marmot groundhog & woodchuck bits scattered all
over the net. And for something goofy, look at this illustration of a
geisha & her pet groundhog:
http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se/loth/n...kopie.jpg.html

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/