St. Remedius Medical College: “Strange Pets And Broken Owners”

Everyone Talks About Wanting Exotic Pets, Nobody Talks About Entitled Keepers

(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)

(From the St. Remedius Archives, June 31, 20XX. All rights reserved.)

This is KREG, 88.7 FM, Dallas/Fort Worth/Denton, and this is Call Sign. I’m your host, Kayla Anno. This morning, we look at a new exhibition on the career of Professor Josiah Carberry of Brown University, how changes to Texas open container laws affect the Goatman’s Bridge Music Festival, and a review of the live-action adaptation of the classic Canadian anime series Space Battleship Edmund Fitzgerald. But first, we go to St. Remedius Medical College in Dallas to see one of the most unique animal rescue facilities on the planet.

(Call Sign theme music)

Good morning, Dallas. I’m Gretchen Sustarre. Dr. Cuauhtémoc Alvarado, head of the veterinary school at St. Remedius Medical College, is well-known through North Texas for his efforts in studying, protecting, and preserving our indigenous exonormal animals and plants, but he also heads the associated St. Remedius Wildlife Rehabilitation Center. Over a truly unique afternoon, Dr. Alvarado shared his ongoing work, his greatest challenges, and his hopes for the future.

(Sounds of a farm or zoo: clanging metal food bowls, light construction equipment, and the occasional roar or screech.)

Sustarre: Dr. Alvarado, what exactly does the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center entail?

Alvarado: Over the last 100 years, human development and expansion has completely changed North Texas, particularly around the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. Because of this, many indigenous animals and nonsentient fae became extinct or endangered, while others took advantage of new conditions and became potential pests. Humans and other sentients brought animals and plants of their own. Some of these remained in captivity or domestication, some died out shortly after they were introduced, and some went feral and became invasive. The Center exists to keep animals and plants that should not be out in the general area, as well as offering educational opportunities to understand how this happened in the first place and how to keep it from getting worse.

Sustarre: You talked about invasive species. Are you working on efforts to control them?

Alvarado: To quote a colleague, the time to do that would have been in the beginning, but we let them overrun us. Dallas County alone has some 227 species of invasive animal and 301 species of invasive plant, most of which you’ll never see because of secretive habits, camouflage, or natural selective invisibility. Others were pets that became too much of a hassle, so people let them loose or ‘let them escape.’ Still others were brought in for a specific purpose that’s no longer relevant, and nobody thought that far ahead. Others slipped through quantum pockets and time rifts and settled in. And with the big genetic engineering boom in the 1990s and nanotech boom in the 2000s, we suddenly had organisms that never existed before. When people talk about the feral dromaeosaurs in the White Rock Lake area, I have to ask “Which ones? The ‘natural’ ones or the gengineered ones?”

Sustarre: How did the dromaeosaurs get there?

Alvarado: The same way we have problems with wyverns and steel moles. Most of the time, they started out as pets or garden animals that either escaped or the owner tired of and let go. Because of earlier problems, you might have strict laws against importation of exotics, but lots of people in Dallas figure that having lots of money makes smuggling in animals and plants okay. The feathered dromaeosaurs were ones smuggled in from a quantum pocket full of Cretaceous animals by someone who really liked them when they saw a dinosaur circus in Hawaii, and the naked-skinned ones were gene-spliced from wild turkeys by a guy who wanted little guard dinosaurs in his back yard but thought feathered dinosaurs weren’t impressive enough. They look a lot alike, but they can’t interbreed, and they definitely compete with each other, especially over spilled dog food and outside cats and coyotes. We can’t return the feathered ones to their pocket without the risk of spreading disease and parasites to the original population, the naked ones have nowhere else to go, and they’re both far too smart to allow hunters to get close enough to wipe them out. Instead, they get hit by cars, get stuck in storm sewers during flash floods, get attacked by bobcats on land and giant catfish when trying to swim rivers and ponds, and freeze when we get bad cold snaps in spring. If someone else hadn’t released kelpies into White Rock Lake in the Eighties, that use the dromaeosaurs as a main food source when they come to the lake for water, the problem would be even worse.

Sustarre: And how does the pet trade affect the invasive population?

Alvarado: Every time there’s a fad TV show or movie featuring an animal, people go nuts. Anybody who works in a pet shop will tell you about the disconnect between pet owners and reality. Remember that old Cartoon Ventures series Procto-Gerbil from the 1990s? [Associated image included with the transcript: an animated gerbil with a miner’s helmet with light, a pickaxe, a maniacal grin, and a T-shirt reading ‘ALL DELIVERIES TO THE REAR”] It’s animated, with voice actor credits and everything, right? Kids definitely knew it was all comedy, but you wouldn’t believe the number of grown adults who saw their kids’ gerbils and wanted to “play Procto-Gerbil.” Most were really into Tailings, Procto’s human sidekick. Remember when Procto would pack Tailings full of gunpowder, climb in, yell “Fire In The Hole!”, and get blasted to wherever he needed to go to fight evil? The number of people who wanted to cosplay Tailings for their pets and traumatized their pets for life, or burned all of their fur off, or got intestinal powder burns. One case in the New England Journal of Medicine was a guy who decided to spice up the gunpowder by mixing it with glitter. GLITTER. You know why grenadiers don’t load ceremonial cannons with glitter? It’s because it ignites. A kilo of glitter turns a cannon into a flamethrower, so you can imagine what this does to some idiot’s large intestine. And as soon as one of these…people tried to sue Cartoon Ventures because the cartoon didn’t have a disclaimer asking viewers not to pack gunpowder up their butts, four or five more would hear about the case being thrown out of court and yell “Hold my beer and watch THIS.”

It’s just as bad with extranormal organisms. Look at the big fad in griffins a few years back. Plenty of people with more money than brains figure that getting a griffin would “keep burglars away,” so suddenly every McMansion in Plano has a griffin. Well, they don’t plan for feeding that griffin when it doesn’t get burglars, or for when the griffin mistakes the mailman for a burglar while the owner is at work. Griffins have to be kept at a weight balance if they’re going to hunt from the air. If they eat too much, they get too heavy to fly, and if they don’t eat enough, they’re too weak to fly, and commercial-grade griffin food is really expensive. It’s also more nutritious than wild-caught prey, so the griffin’s beak and claws grow faster than they would in the wild, and professional claw trimming and beak coping is expensive. Griffins also need training and general exercise, especially if their person plans to ride them, so most people get thrown into the top of a tree don’t want to risk it again. Griffins, hippogriffs, manticores, and pegasi loathe each other, so they’re all making racket when they see each other and screaming at each other all night. And while griffins fly, they also like to dig burrows, so you have to make sure they don’t dig under the house foundation or break a water or sewer line. You simply can’t keep them as an indoor pet, but what do people try to do? They try to make them a lapbeast like a chimera or a hodag, and they get all sorts of health issues from the stress. Do you know what to do when a griffin gets explosive diarrhea because you’ve been feeding it snacks and it tries to fly indoors?

An additional problem is with sentient species. Dragons, unicorns, centaurs…all of these are intelligent lifeforms, all considered full citizens under the Lampasas Treaty of 1968, but you still have more-money-than-brains types in the Park Cities who say “So?” A few weeks ago, we went to track down a feral glyptodont in Turtle Creek and found someone who had enslaved a dozen satyrs and sylphs, had them chained up and gagged in a back lot and was using them for making “Intermingling of the Species” porn. When the police and Exonormal Affairs arrived, the argument was “I didn’t know they could talk,” and because of their connections, things will be tied up in court for a while.

Sustarre: So what made you start the Center?

Alvarado: Just because they don’t belong here doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve respect. You wouldn’t believe the stories: we have what’s left of a flock of phoenixes that a lawyer out west of Fort Worth was raising during the big speculation boom a while back. When the bubble burst and the value of an adult phoenix dropped from $100,000 to $10, the lawyer went into the paddock with a baseball bat. We have 400 hectares of area reserved to replicate natural habitats, so we have savannah, jungle, forest, fynbos, and swamp enclaves, and other spaces for special needs like atmosphere chambers or Faraday cages. Some have extra features such as soundproofing: a few years back, some genius planned to corner the market on Blatant Beast cubs, and you do not want inadequate sound baffling around a full pack. The idea is that every animal and every mobile plant here will be able to live out its life in peace.

Sustarre: What’s a typical day at the Center like?

Alvarado: Well, the Center is also a training site for St. Remedius veterinary students, so we start every morning with feeding and medicating. Some of the dinosaurs have horrible allergies during the spring, and the dirgebats on site need augmentations to deal with Earth’s higher gravity, for instance. We’re constantly experimenting with better feed and habitat enhancements, so after everybody’s eaten, there’s a lot of life enrichment. Playing with the drop bears, simulating hunts with electrocats and chasing lures for terror birds. This gives students a chance to get close to many species they usually wouldn’t see in their practice, and allows them to get a good healthy respect for the animals. Meanwhile, they keep records on feedings, weight, and any potential issues. We simply don’t know how long some of the gengineered animals might live, for instance, so we’re constantly learning more about geriatric medicine.

Sustarre: Do you ever get angry about the number of animals at the Center?

Alvarado: Never at the animals, but at the people who brought them in, yeah. Sometimes you can’t even get angry with them. A few years back, we were flooded with abandoned familiars – cats, owls, ravens, parrots, a couple of badgers, and a big cane toad named Murdoch – belonging to Outstanding Witch types. Familiars are even closer to their people than typical pets, and this just looked like casual cruelty for no reason. What we didn’t know was that this particular coven was infested with a new type of neonate botfly that would “talk” to its host, and their chirpings were pretty much identical to the voices they were already hearing. We brought in the whole coven, deloused them and removed the grubs, and gave the familiars a chance to go back to their people or stay here. We still have a lot of them here, and many bond with students and stay with them their entire lives. The others…well, Murdoch is a natural talking to a lot of the bigger animals, and we couldn’t do as much as we do without him.

This is Kayla Anno, and this is Call Sign. Next up, the legacy of local critic Benjamin Willard and 40 years of attempted relevance.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

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