Terry Halifax
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Nov 15/99) - People in the North love to keep pets and mostly just dogs and cats, but a few Northerners have been inclined to walk on the wild side.

Probably the most exotic pet to ever come North was Sheba, Al Sardine's pet lioness.

Al would walk around Yellowknife with Sheba on a short leash, because the lion was terrified of dogs.

Eventually, the municipality cracked down on Sheba and she was sent to a game farm down south.

While losing his pet, the move must have done wonders for Al's love life.

"The poor guy could never get a date because he always had this lion with him," recalled Wendy Eggenberger of JJ Hobbies in Yellowknife.

"Could you imagine sitting down to dinner with this huge lion beside you?"

JJ Hobbies ships exotics all over the North, she said, with orders for iguanas, snakes, skinks, tree frogs, hedgehogs, scorpions and all types of spiders.

"We shipped a Goliath bird-eater to Holman Island once," she said. "It's a spider, but it doesn't eat birds though."

"It eats whatever crawls past his house," added co-manager Jennifer Eggenberger.

Mostly the orders are pretty tame, Wendy said. She just wishes the people would all get together on their orders.

"We ship a lot of fish and we try to get people to get together to save money on shipping," she said. "I had one lady in here from Inuvik to buy fish and the same day I had two other calls from Inuvik to ship fish -- if they would just get together, they could save some money."

Matt Poulin is the reptile guy at PJ's Pet Centres in Edmonton. He said they also get calls to ship all over the North.

He said the orders are all pretty basic, by their standards. The difficulty, he noted, is getting live food for the exotics.

"Usually just iguanas because they're vegetarians or snakes, because you only have to feed them once a month," Poulin said.

"We get people looking for lots of different things," Poulin said.

"But it's a little harder to keep exotic pets up North because there are no live crickets and mice to feed them."

"So they make a trip down here once every couple months to stock up."