Mike Tyson isn’t the only one with a strange pet: these celebrities all had weird animals as companions

Boxing icon Mike Tyson may stand alone in taking a Bengal tiger out for neighborhood strolls, but he’s hardly the only star with a taste for unconventional companionship. His big-cat phase – complete with tigers that slept in his bedroom, leapt over walls, and once mistook a neighbor’s dog for lunch – is now folklore. Yet history is packed with equally unhinged pet-owner pairings that prove celebrity eccentricity predates social media by several centuries, as the History Collection reports.

Surrealists, presidents, and poets with pets

Salvador Dalí’s ocelot, Babou, was the perfect accessory for a man who treated life like performance art. Babou reportedly dined beside him in restaurants, terrifying waitstaff who didn’t realize the “tabby” had jungle credentials.

Teddy Roosevelt effectively turned the White House into a roaming petting zoo, complete with a hyena, snakes, and a one-legged rooster. He even kept a pig named Maude, because of course the man who created the national parks wasn’t stopping at dogs.

Lord Byron, meanwhile, found Cambridge University’s “no dogs allowed” policy so absurd that he adopted a bear instead. Officials couldn’t find a rule against that, and the poet made sure the bear attended classes with him.

Hollywood’s wildest friendships

Audrey Hepburn raised a deer named Pippin who followed her around Beverly Hills like a scene from a fairytale film she never made. Elvis Presley’s chimpanzee, Scatter, caused enough chaos at Graceland to qualify for his own biopic.

And Tippi Hedren once shared her home with lions, long before she campaigned for animal-safety laws.

So while Tyson’s tigers remain the heavyweight champions of bizarre pet lore, he’s part of a long tradition: celebrities collecting animals as unconventional as the lives they lead.

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