Students Bring Unlikely Roommates—Pets—to Harvard Dorms

Harvard dormitories often house lab rats and party animals. The girl next door might be as quiet as a mouse, and your roommate can sometimes be a pig.

In addition to these commonplace dorm residents, you may have a more surprising critter for a neighbor—a real live animal.

In dorms across Harvard, students are secretly raising animals, violating the College’s no-pets policy.

Small animals like hamsters, turtles, and fish are the most common. More exotic pets, including a python and chinchillas, have also found homes in Harvard undergraduates’ rooms. The Crimson has confirmed the presence of one rabbit and several cats—and rumors swirl about a pig residing in Adams and a dog that lived in the Quad a few years ago.

Pet owners say that these animals provide an offbeat conversation starter, comforting companionship, and a sense of home in a temporary living space. But if College administrators discover these residents’ secret sidekicks, students can be forced to relocate their pets and may even face disciplinary consequences.

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

A senior chuckles as Mashie II—his third hamster in three years—climbs the metal rungs of her cage, which fits snugly on his bookshelf.

“They love whipped cream,” he says, squirting some of the sugary confection onto his index finger.

In a dorm room nearby, another  rodent—a black rat named Behemoth—has a healthier favorite food: grapes. Raised in a household that kept as many as nine cats at a time, Behemoth’s owner has a convenient source of sustenance for her pet. “I steal a lot of rat food from the dining hall,” she admits.

Behemoth scrambles over her owner’s body and futon as her owner chatters to her, calling her names like “dear” and “buddy.”

“Can you not eat my statistics book?” she says, chiding her gently.

“I love having pets,” she says. “It’s a pretty good stress reliever. They aren’t going to complain to you about the p-set that they have due in 40 minutes.”

Some students look beyond mammals for creature comforts.

One senior kept his pet python, which he has had since sixth grade, in his room at Harvard during his sophomore year.

Though the four-foot-long python, named Monty, has been in residence with the student’s parents since the student moved out of his spacious DeWolfe suite, the python’s owner has fond memories of it slithering around the common room while he studied.

NO PETS ALLOWED

Despite the benefits of pet ownership, College policy expressly forbids pets in dorms.

The issue is addressed in one unequivocal sentence in the Handbook for Students: “No student may keep an animal in a building owned or leased by the College.”

Administrators cite several reasons for forbidding animals in the dorms.

“A concern, obviously, is the health issue. People might be allergic,” says Katie W. Steele, director for freshman programming. “Also, the health of the pet: Is a college dorm really the best place for it?”

During his time as resident dean of Lowell House, Secretary of the Administrative Board John “Jay” L. Ellison says that one student requested to keep a dog in her room.

“We just felt that having a dog in the House was not appropriate,” Ellison says. “Students are allergic to dogs and some are scared of dogs, and this is a place for [students] to be comfortable.”

Ellison adds that the transitional nature of student life is ill-suited to pet ownership, saying that some students have abandoned pets when they left for the summer.

Freshman proctors and resident tutors—who live at the College year-round and usually have larger rooms—are allowed to keep pets in their suites.

While administrators agree that pets are verboten for students, there is no clear penalty for students caught with pets in their dorms.

Dean of Freshmen Thomas A. Dingman ’67 says that if a resident dean were to learn of an animal in a dorm, the first response would be “to make sure the pet has a new home.”

In addition, Dingman believes that the student might receive a Dean’s Warning—a disciplinary sanction which is reported to the Ad Board but requires no further action from the board.

In the case of the Lowell student with the dog, Ellison says that the student agreed to move off-campus in order to keep the pet.

He says that such cases only reach the Ad Board if the student refuses to cooperate with the House’s request to remove the pet.

Bryan J. Martin ’12 and James W. Nitze ’12 have experienced the College’s reaction to a pet firsthand. During his freshman year, Nitze purchased two chinchillas at a cost of about $200 each, he says. About a month later, he added two turtles to his dorm room menagerie.

The chinchillas—which Nitze describes as “a cross between a squirrel, a hamster, a guinea pig, and a bunny” with “the softest fur in the world”—lived in rodent luxury in Martin and Nitze’s sophomore room in Mather House. Nitze spent two weeks constructing a two-tier cage for the critters, a five-foot-tall structure complete with ramps, steps, a wheel, and a hammock.

When their building manager and resident dean learned of the rodents’ presence, the students were ordered to remove the animals as quickly as possible. Unsure where to take the pets, Nitze brought the cage to the Porcellian Club, where he left an explanatory note telling members: “Don’t panic.”

The chinchillas ate the note. When the perplexed final club authorities finally identified the creatures’ owner, they, too, demanded that the animals leave. Nitze’s brother, visiting from Washington, D.C., drove the chinchillas home.

Martin and Nitze’s run-in with the pet police has not stopped them from keeping animals in their room, though; today, the surviving member of the pair of turtles resides in a tank in their common room. Nitze says a resident tutor and a security guard have spotted the turtle, named Blarney, and have not complained.

“If they really made us get rid of this f—ing turtle, I just wouldn’t,” Nitze says. “It’s just so ridiculous.”

Some students go to great lengths to hide their pets. The rat owner says she keeps the curtains of her common room permanently closed to avoid detection, the python owner tied the snake in a pillowcase to move him in and out of DeWolfe, and many students requested anonymity for this story.

Others are less concerned with secrecy.

Maria F. Barragan-Santana ’14 says she thinks her proctor knows about the fish in her room. Her floor in Thayer conferred to determine the name of the fish, eventually christening it Colonel William Henry Thayer IV.

“It’s not like it’s going to walk out of my dorm,” Barragan-Santana says. “The worst thing that could happen is the bowl breaks. Then all you have is water all over the floor and a flopping fish.”

ANIMAL HOUSE

Caring for a pet can be a struggle for students, who must balance busy schedules, cramped quarters, and long breaks with an animal’s need for stable care.

Nitze, who spent winter break in New Zealand this year, realized just hours before his flight from Boston that he needed to buy food for Blarney before leaving. He raced to PetSmart, where he purchased five seven-day feeders to leave in the turtle’s tank.

“There’s this awful blizzard, but Blarney’s probably going to starve to death if I don’t leave something,” Nitze recalls thinking as he set off through the snow. The break was a success: “Not only did he survive, so did all the fish” who were sharing the tank at the time.

The hamster owner left a Tupperware container full of feed in Mashie II’s cage when he went home for two weeks this winter. He worried that the hamster might “turn stupid and not know where the food was,” but she survived.

Students also worry about the possibility of a pet escaping. “A couple times I forgot to close the cage,” the hamster owner admits. When Mashie I, a now-deceased hamster, once disappeared, her owner sealed the cracks along the walls of his room and put out dishes of food to try to lure her into the open.

After two days, the owner awoke in the night when he heard her scratching at his desk.

Martin, Nitze’s roommate, recalls that the chinchillas would “ram their heads through the cardboard flap” to try to escape from their cage.

One day, Nitze purposely let Franklin, one of the three chinchillas he has kept at Harvard, run around his common room.

While he was on the loose, Franklin chewed on a wire.

“He was sort of twitching,” Nitze recalls, then he “flopped over.”

Though Franklin survived unscathed, Nitze says that it was “the awfullest thing I’d ever seen.”

Beyond electrocution scares, others say that dorm rooms are not suited to keeping pets due to their small size.

The python owner only kept Monty in his room for the year that he lived in DeWolfe, where his snake could live in a large closet in his bedroom.

The rat owner agrees that small rooms are problematic for pet ownership. “I really wanted a cat,” she says, noting that her mother kept a cat in her own Harvard dorm room. (Breaking the no-pets policy “is a family tradition, I guess,” she says.) “But I thought that it would not be fair to a cat to live in such a small space.”

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

Some students see these difficulties as reasons to support the no-pets rule, while others wish that the policy was more lenient.

“I guess the school has to enforce a policy, because you can’t have everyone in a dorm keeping ferrets. It would get all messy and smelly,” Nitze says.

The rat owner says that she supports the rule against pets, even though she is breaking it.

“I think the College policy, while probably not intended for the welfare of pets, helps out because college students are generally irresponsible and probably wouldn’t take the best care of a pet,” she says.

The student who kept a python believes that caged animals such as rodents and reptiles should be permitted.

Barragan-Santana also supports a policy that would allow certain types of animals.

“I don’t see why we shouldn’t be able to have fish,” she says.

The hamster owner says he resents the fact that tutors in his House can officially keep pets, while he must hide his hamster: During winter break, he left her in her cage under his bed, along with his contraband microwave.

“They’re only three or four years older than us,” he says. “It doesn’t seem like a very fair rule.”

Nitze insists that his chinchillas were well-treated in his dorm room. “They were really clean. We took care of them—they were living in real style.”

Yet that did not sway House staff’s demand that the animals go, he says. “Without asking any questions, they made us get rid of the chinchillas.”

—Stephanie B. Garlock contributed to the reporting of this article.

—Staff writer Julie M. Zauzmer can be reached at jzauzmer@college.harvard.edu.