Emus are big and not at all cuddly and wouldn’t make good pets, especially not for your children. They can get vicious; their kick is savage, and the claws in their toes can disembowel a man.
Carole Sutton, my writer friend who lives in Western Australia has an emu for a pet, and this is her story about an emu she named Lucky:
Lucky was a wee chick, only five days old, when he came into my life. He’d survived the dog attack that killed his family by fleeing through a fence and into a swamp, where I found him crying and floundering in terror. The neighbour who owned his family and other emus agreed to let me try to rear him.
I knew nothing about rearing emus. But, he was a baby, and babies needed warmth, food and affection. My husband hung an infrared lamp inside a small shed. I made up a nest of dried grass, with an old pillow and a blanket to emulate the comfort of his parent’s body.
But, what did emus eat that I had access to? The local bird shop advised turkey-starter crumbs, as like growing turkeys, emus needed a lot of calcium for their huge legs.
Lucky refused to eat. In desperation, I sat on the floor and sprinkled the white crumbs on my black trousers. Fascinated, he pecked at them. Once he got the idea, he took the crumbs from wet lettuce leaves and eventually from a bowl. I walked him around our block several times a day, pointing my finger to a plant I thought he could eat. In time, he learned to eat the leaves and not my poor battered finger. His dad would have made a better job.
He craved affection. When the sun went down I sat on the floor and he climbed into my lap for a cuddle. When it was time for me to go, I formed a burrow into his blanket cave underneath the red lamp and he would scamper inside to sleep.
We fixed a wire enclosure outside the shed for him to run in during the day. Barking dogs or cawing ravens sent him scurrying inside his cardboard box. By the time he was eight weeks old he came to his name and had a hearty appetite that included anything shiny, watches, spectacles and zips. The sound of the ride-on mower thrilled him. He jerked his head when he heard its call, and barged his way out of his pen to chase after the mower and run beside it.
He became too big for our standard size fences. Hopping over it only caused him grief. On one occasion, a dog bite traumatised him, and on another, he put other people in danger when he stopped the traffic on a nearby road.
Once he was an adult, the neighbour from whence he came agreed to take him back. Lucky returned to others of his kind. At first viewed with suspicion, he eventually found a mate, Brown Eyes. For months, the two of them paced the block side by side. Then, nature took its course.
The photographs and the story of Lucky presented here are copyrighted by Carole Sutton and may not be reposted to the Internet or redistributed in any form without her permission.
