Tippi’s top cat ...Neil the lion
QUESTION What are the weirdest animals kept as pets?
Neil was a full-grown male lion owned by actress Tippi Hedren — star of Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller The Birds — and her then husband Noel Marshall, producer of 1973 horror The exorcist.
There are extraordinary photographs published in life magazine in 1971 of Tippi’s then 19-year-old daughter Melanie Griffith, the future Hollywood actress, cavorting around the family swimming pool with the pet lion.
Neil came to live with the family in bizarre circumstances. He was adopted from Anton laVey, High Priest of the Church of Satan. laVey, who called the lion Togar, was unable to keep him in his small San Francisco apartment.
Hedren subsequently founded the Shambala Preserve, an animal sanctuary for the protection of mistreated or neglected exotic animals.
Natalie Reynard, Whitby, N. Yorks. THe poet lord Byron owned a fox, wolf, monkeys, parrot, cats, an eagle, crow, falcon, peacocks, guinea hens, an egyptian crane, badger, geese, heron, a goat and several horses.
His most famous pet was a bear. During his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, Byron was resentful of the fact that the rules forbade him to keep his dogs on the premises.
There was no mention of bears in the regulations, so he bought a tame creature called Bruin. They would walk around the town together and Byron would revel in the astonished glances they received.
Upon graduating, he took the bear with him to his ancestral home, Newstead Abbey, where it could roam the grounds with his wolf.
Jenny Blake, Cambridge.
SURREALIST painter Salvador Dali had a thing for anteaters. He was photographed taking his giant anteater for a walk through the streets of Paris in 1969.
in 1970, he appeared on The Dick Cavett Show in America with a small anteater on a leash. He stunned the audience when he casually tossed the animal onto the lap of his co-guest, the silent movie actress lillian Gish.
Socialite Paris Hilton owned a pet kinkajou called Baby luv. A kinkajou is a South American rainforest animal related to the racoon. Hilton famously had to have a tetanus shot when Baby luv bit her in 2006.
Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler has a pet racoon who rides on his shoulder when he goes fishing.
ice ice Baby rapper robert Van Winkle, aka Vanilla ice, owned a wallaroo, Bucky, and pet goat, Pancho. The pair hit the headlines in 2004 when they escaped from ice’s Florida home in Port St lucie. Bucky was apprehended after scratching a woman’s car.
George Clooney was the proud owner of a 200lb pot-bellied pig called Max and was said to be devastated when the pet died in 2006.
Jane Forrester, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion.
QUESTION Can we grow trees at the same rate as we burn wood pellets in biomass power stations?
THE answer is yes, but it can come at an environmental cost. Wood pellets are made from compacted sawdust as a by-product in lumber mills. Fast-growing species such as willow, alder, poplar and paper birch are favoured.
in Britain, willow ( salix spp) is the most popular wood for biomass pellets. The common osier or basket willow ( Salix
viminalis) grows at over one metre a year. A single hectare of willow can produce 12 oven- dry tonnes of wood pellets per year.
Power stations are a bit more tricky. They need hundreds of tonnes of pellets and a lot of these are shipped from the U.S. in the race to meet clean energy standards, biomass energy is touted as carbon neutral.
To satisfy EU demand, U.S. forests have been chopped up into wood pellets and shipped abroad, to the tune of seven million metric tonnes annually to help fulfil Paris Agreement commitments.
There are grave concerns about this as native woodlands are being replaced by fast-growing species, destroying diversity and ecosystems. The CO2 incurred by transporting large quantities of biomass is not taken into account when calculating carbon neutrality.
if you have land and want to be selfsufficient in wood fuel, this is achievable in three to four years. A small farm using 10,000 litres of oil per year for heating would require 27 to 33 tonnes of wood fuel per annum.
This could be produced by growing just three hectares of willow managed as short rotation coppice. This is an area of woodland in which the trees or shrubs are cut back periodically to ground level to stimulate growth and provide timber.
Over the 25-year lifetime of such a plantation, the cost of fuel should be below 2p per kWh. Coppicing costs £2,500 per hectare to establish, but is eligible for a 50 per cent planting grant through the energy Crops Scheme.
Alan Gower, Matlock, Derbys.
QUESTION Novels about the wartime Navy feature a game called Uckers. Was this a variation of the board game Ludo? What were the rules?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, yes, Uckers is similar to ludo, but the rules are a little more adult. We played it on 205 Squadron at rAF Changi in 1970 under what was known as maritime rules.
The terminology included Blobs, two counters on the same space, which single counters of another player could not cross; and Sucks, where a counter in the homeward stretch of the board could be knocked back to the start by the correct throw of a dice.
i’m pretty certain we weren’t supposed to play it for money, but equally certain that cash did change hands!
Mike Barker, St Agnes, Cornwall.
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