wild things : Rent by Beasts

There isn’t a couple in the world in which one partner doesn’t have some gripe about the other. The list is endless: too tidy, too boozy, too thrifty, too flirty, or, in the case of Jackie and John Jacobson--too fond of wild, biting animals.

For 20 years, John has watched his wife accumulate so many animals--four alligators (down from a high of 10), 12 monkeys, 10 tortoises, four ferrets and three iguanas--that the city of Claremont has zoned their yard for a zoo. “It’s miserable at times,” John says. “I get scared of them and they know it. I’m afraid I’ll be bitten and I was once, by a capuchin monkey that opened my thumb and left me with a stiff finger.”

Jackie, a retired sixth-grade teacher who now runs several private schools, began this marital test two decades ago when an acquaintance moved to Europe and didn’t know what to do with Alex, his 2 1/2-foot-long pet alligator. “So he asked me to take him in,” says Jackie.

She bought books on how to care for her new guest and enlisted her husband, now a retired fire captain for the city of Pomona, to build a pen for Alex in the back yard. Once the gator was feeling at home, a menagerie began to grow. A doctor from Riverside dropped off an abandoned monkey. The animals she adopted were sent to her for many reasons, she says, “but all came from traumatic situations.”

Their home is visited by hundreds of children a year, she says, including some from a preschool next door. “Once a year, the children get to see the animals and they love being next door,” says Carrie Gram, a teacher at the Chicken Little preschool. “They love to watch Charlie (one of the gators), who they can see through a glass door of the school.”

John, it seems, would love to be able to simply watch the alligators and other beasts through a glass door.

“They scare the hell out of me,” he says.