My favourite pet I’d like to have is a cat (and I have one. Well, a cat moved in with us ten years ago and allows us to feed her and pet her and pay her vet bills. I would never imply ownership. Dogs have owners; cats have staff).
But my favourite fictional pet is one I would never have in real life.
I live in New Zealand, a country with exactly zero snakes. We don’t have any native snakes, and we don’t allow any snakes to be imported (probably because the Kiwi, our national bird, is flightless and Kiwi eggs make a great snack for snakes and other pests).
So it’s perhaps a little surprising to me that my favourite fictional pets are both snakes.
In fairness, the first “pet” isn’t so much a pet as an unwanted houseguest, the kind it’s impossible to get rid of. One of the characters in Back to Resolution by Rose Dee has a snake living in the eves of their bush house. The snake does a good job at protecting the property from unwanted visitors, so it gets to stay.
The second is snake is the title character in Belinda Blake and the Snake in the Grass, the first book in Heather Day Gilbert’s Exotic Pet Sitter Mystery series. Belinda’s first job is pet-sitting Rasputin, a ball python … who has nothing to do with the dead body she finds in her flowerbed.
