In 1722, a pet squirrel named Mungo passed away. It was a tragedy: Mungo escaped its confines and met its fate at the teeth of a dog. Benjamin Franklin, friend of the owner, immortalized the squirrel with a tribute.“Few squirrels were better accomplished, for he had a good education, had traveled far, and seen much of the world.” Franklin wrote, adding, “Thou art fallen by the fangs of wanton, cruel Ranger!”
Mourning a squirrel’s death wasn’t as uncommon as you might think when Franklin wrote Mungo’s eulogy; in the 18th- and 19th centuries, squirrels were fixtures in American homes, especially for children. While colonial Americans kept many types of wild animals as pets, squirrels “were the most popular,” according to Katherine Grier’s Pets in America, being relatively easy to keep.
By the 1700s, a golden era of squirrel ownership was in full swing. Squirrels were sold in markets and found in the homes of wealthy urban families, and portraits of well-to-do children holding a reserved, polite upper-class squirrel attached to a gold chain leash were proudly displayed (some of which are currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Most pet squirrels were American Grey Squirrels, though Red Squirrels and Flying Squirrels also were around, enchanting the country with their devil-may-care attitudes and fluffy bodies.
By the 19th century, a canon of squirrel-care literature emerged for the enthusiast. In the 1851 book Domestic pets: their habits and management, Jane Loudon writes more about squirrels as pets than rabbits, and devotes an entire chapter to the “beautiful little creature, very agile and graceful in its movements.” Squirrels “may be taught to jump from one hand to the other to search for a hidden nut, and it soon knows its name, and the persons who feed it.” Loudin also waxes on their habits, like jumping around a room and peeping out from wooden eaves, writing that “an instance is recorded of no less than seventeen lumps of sugar being found in the cornice of a drawing-room in which a squirrel had been kept, besides innumerable nuts, pieces of biscuit.” Loudon’s advice: when your squirrel is not running around the room, provide it with a tin-lined cage that has a running wheel.
Leisure Hour Monthly, meanwhile, in 1859, advised to feed it “a fig or a date now and then,” and that you should start your squirrel-raising adventure with those procured “directly from the nest, when possible.” The unnamed author’s own pet squirrels, Dick and Peter, had the freedom of his bedroom and plenty of nuts to store away. “Let your pet squirrels crack their own nuts, my young squirrel fanciers,” the author wrote.