Students leaving home for the first time often have a hard time adjusting to the lack of clean clothes, home-cooked meals, privacy and, in some cases, their beloved pets. And since university housing does not allow any pets in the dorm other than fish in a 20-gallon or smaller tank, students often resort to sneaking their pets in.
Some crafty students find ways to avoid detection, going to great lengths to remove telltale traces of animal life, even temporarily relocating pets right before room inspections.
In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the head of university housing at Michigan State, Paula Palmiter, revealed, “I have discovered enough critters in dorms to fill a pet store or two. We know they’re up there, but enforcing the rules isn’t always easy.”
Residence Life Coordinators on the University of Wisconsin campus refused to comment on the number of pets found in dorms each year, but UW senior Adam Trigg is proof that pets do in fact sometimes sneak in.
During his sophomore year at UW, Trigg lived in Kronshage Hall’s Jones House in the Lakeshore Dorms. Although Jones House follows the same rules as all other university housing buildings, allowing only small fish, Trigg managed to keep a pet lizard named “Izzi Fish” for most of first semester.
“My RA never really found out,” Trigg said. “And even though I had to keep live crickets in the room to feed him, no one on the floor ever complained.”
In fact, Adam and Izzi Fish probably would have gone on living together for much longer if not for a freak accident halfway through the fall semester.
“This guy followed one of the girls on my floor home one night, and when she wouldn’t let him stay, he got mad,” Trigg recounts. “He started spraying the fire extinguisher all over the hallway and pulled the fire alarm.”
Trigg, who reported being intoxicated at the time, ran from the dorm in the confusion, and accidentally left the door to his room open.
“The chemicals from the fire extinguisher got in my room and all over Izzi Fish’s cage,” Trigg said. “After that he just stopped eating, and eventually died.”
Adam and Izzi Fish are not the only student-pet relationship to end in sadness, however. Janitors often find abandoned dogs and cats when students move out at the end of the school year, and are forced to take them to shelters.
“There’s usually an increase in animals left behind in the spring and the fall when students have to move,” Director of the Dane County Humane Society, Pam McLoud, said. “When students get the pets, they usually don’t realize the time and commitment it’s going to take to keep them.”
McLoud also said students caught with pets in places where their living situation could be compromised upon discovery are more than likely to give up the animals rather than be forced to move.
And for those students who are caught with an animal in the dorms, the price can be very high. One UW senior, who wishes to remain anonymous, was a friend of a Residential Assistant at the Univeristy of Minnesota, who learned the hard way about sneaking pets onto campus.
“My friend was pet-sitting a girl’s hamster for just one night … and when it wound up getting discovered, she was fired immediately, thrown out of the dorms and had to move back home with her parents,” the UW senior said.
But animal love does not always have to be so hard. Students looking for a fur “fix” can volunteer at Dane County Humane Society by calling 838-0413, ext. 114. Otherwise, there is always the cat at J. Kinney Florist on King Street named Potted Tulip, or Copy Cat at Bob’s Copy Shop in University Square, both of which are available for students to play with.
