Pets: A Family Portrait

Most families are unusual in some way — especially when pets are included in the mix. Whether it’s a donkey, deer or goats, these peculiar pets have found loving homes with their passionate owners.

Pig Pen

Thud, thud, thud.

Henri Bakn is cold.

The Juliana mini pig mix uses his snout to slam a mini electric fireplace heater against the wall. Oiiink. Oiiink. Oiiink, he screams with escalating desperation. His owner, Ashley Beisecker, gets his message and rises from the couch to plug in the heater.

“Pigs are extremely needy,” declares the Wadsworth Township resident.

Beisecker has become a “pig person,” as she calls it. As a kid, she inherited porcine trinkets from her late great-aunt but badly wanted a real one. In late 2013, she visited Ledge Life Farm, a mini pig breeder in Hinckley. She sat down on the floor, and two pink piglets curled up in her lap. One black piglet, Henri, crawled right into her arms. She had found her pig.

“I saw Henri and I fell in love,” says the special education teacher.

Beisecker took the little piggy everywhere, and he hammed it up for passersby. She strapped the 6-pound piglet into a stroller and rolled him around Fairlawn Parks & Recreation events, for which her mom, Laurie, is the director.

The now 50-pound heifer has gotten used to sharing the spotlight, as he recently made room for a new housemate: black rescue cat Hilde Mae. They like to lay together in Beisecker’s small fenced-in backyard. There, Henri soaks up sunny rays and grazes on grass.

Food — especially Cheerios — is the way to Henri’s heart. To get a few handfuls of the O’s, he’ll play his child-sized piano with his snout, knock over toy bowling pins and even paint with his snout. With the cognitive ability of a 3-year-old, Henri learns tricks fast. Beisecker demonstrates an odd one, called forking a pig. She takes a fork and pokes it along his body until his eyelids relax and he lies down. Then she gently pokes his underbelly, sending him into a peaceful trance.

Henri comforts Beisecker, too, mostly with snuggles.

“I have bruises on my legs because of him climbing on me,” says the petite blonde. He slept in her bed until January when he became too heavy and really hogged the bed.

Pigs are sensitive, so they make good therapy animals. Beisecker deals with anxiety, and Henri knows when to soothe her.

“He’ll smoosh his snout against my face to calm me down,” she says. “He fixes everything, Dr. Henri Bakn.” Henri oinks in approval.

Bird Brain

Kelly Hope’s husband, Steve, grew up as a toddler on a farm in Canada, and the couple wanted to bring a bit of that rural memory to their acre of land in Stow. “We can’t have cows on an acre,” she says, “so ducks it is.”

Two years ago, the couple added six Khaki Campbell ducklings to their family of two teens and a treeing Walker coonhound named Tanner they’d rescued a couple of years earlier.

Coonhounds are hunting dogs, so there was some apprehension about how Tanner would coexist with the birds. “We would let him smell them and be around them when they were little babies,” Hope says. “So he just never thought of trying to attack them.”

Residents of The 330 are quite used to seeing mallards, geese and other waterfowl around our rivers and parks, but as a pet, ducks are unusual. The more common choice is chickens — often for the eggs, but with ducks, they can still enjoy eggs.

“We decided ducks are a little more tame,” Hope says. Steve’s mother also informed their choice. “My mother-in-law is allergic to chicken eggs, but the protein is different in duck eggs, and she can eat those.”

Tanner and the three ducks who lived to maturity get along famously now, all running over together when Hope calls Tanner and horning in on the action whenever people try to play with the dog.

Only the male duck has a name, Brian, and even that used to be Brianna. “They don’t really change their feathers until they’re older,” Hope says about distinguishing the all-brown females from the male whose head is now a deep green. “We started to name the girls, but then we just couldn’t tell who was who anymore. There is one that is kind of like the leader of the girls, Maggie, but the only way we know is when we go to feed them, she’s the more aggressive one and will stand on your feet to get to the worms.”

Friendship doesn’t care about names, so the ducks and Tanner follow each other everywhere until bedtime, when Tanner goes inside Hope’s house and the ducks retire to their own barn.

A Deer Friend

It’s time for Dillie’s snack. The deer emerges from her bedroom and gingerly walks down the stairs, one hoof at a time. Her owner, Melanie Butera, clutches a bowl of wheat spaghetti and leads Dillie to the front porch. Like a dog gulps food out of its bowl, Dillie puts her snout in and gobbles up spaghetti.

The strange situation of a deer living inside a home has captured hearts of people around the world who love Dillie’s redemptive story of perseverance and compassion.

In 2005, a farmer rushed an extremely sick 3-day-old blind Dillie to a Stark County emergency veterinarian clinic Butera was working at. Butera nursed Dillie back to health, but the farmer didn’t want her. So Butera took her to her Canal Fulton home. It sounds shocking, but many years ago Butera partnered with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources to rehab wildlife, so she had brought home deer before.

Dillie learned how to fit into Butera’s home by shadowing and imitating Lady, their late standard poodle, then bonded with Willie, their new standard poodle. She’s now so comfortable in the household that while Butera and her husband, Steve Heathman, eat dinner, she eats meals — and treats herself to the occasional bowl of ice cream — beside them on the floor.

Just as Butera saved Dillie, Dillie helped Butera beat cancer. In 2012, Butera had already survived one bout of uterine cancer and then got news that she had thousands of masses throughout her body and would need more radiation and chemo. It was so bad that her doctor told her to get her affairs in order. She went home and started writing her obituary and selecting funeral music: Luciano Pavarotti’s “Tosca” opera. As the music was playing, Dillie walked in and laid her head on Butera’s lap.

“I thought, She shouldn’t have been alive. If she had died on day three, nobody would have known she exists,” Butera says. “Yet, I got a blanket on her bed from Australia, I’ve got toys from England. We had a Korean film crew out here, we had a Russian newspaper. All this she did, and she never even left this property. All of us really do make a difference.”

She stopped writing her obituary and started writing “Dillie the Deer,” which she calls her “I was here” legacy. The book chronicles her cancer journey and the international fame that Dillie acquired through news stories, livestreams on Ustream and Periscope, and a nightly 8 p.m. Facebook live broadcast to a group of 14,500-plus fans.

Butera and Heathman don’t have children, but Dillie is theirs.

“She is our daughter to us,” Butera says.

Leader of the Pack

Steve Smith jokes that chickens are the gateway drug of hobby farming. He and his wife, Janet, have a small farm in Rootstown. Until he was 12, Smith lived on a farm outside of Erie, Pennsylvania, but he and Janet both lived in cities for most of their lives. He calls the move to an agrarian lifestyle “a midlife crisis.”

Smith had been volunteering with Greyhound Adoption of Ohio and felt motivated by the thousands of animals placed into good homes through that agency. “I was so inspired by what she was able to do,” he says. “I’m like, Geez, I think I could do something as meaningful by working with another group of animals.”

A portion of roughly 97 animals the Smiths keep on their 14 acres are rescues from Happy Trails Farm Animal Sanctuary in Ravenna. At present, Smith tallies 35 chickens, 25 white homing pigeons, 18 ducks, four geese, four sheep, five goats, a donkey, a pony, a horse and a llama. Their farm, A New Hope, is not a commercial farm; they sell duck and chicken eggs to their work colleagues, but production is not the main focus here.

Happy Trails rescues large animals from various circumstances, and the Smiths often become the forever home for animals the sanctuary doesn’t have room for. Smith didn’t have experience with all the different species, but he reads about their medical care and employs a pragmatic approach to everyday interactions: “I treat them like I treat the dogs, positive reinforcement and stuff like that.”

Smith tries to house the animals according to their character: equines grouped together and the like. Still some strange bedfellows have emerged.

“The llama is paired with the goats and the chickens,” he says. “She completely bonded with them within three days, and anytime something suspicious is going on, she rounds everybody up and pushes them into a corner of the paddock and will stand guard. She’s very serious.”

The chickens will stand on the goats’ backs, and interesting sleeping arrangements have developed. “I’ll have my sheep sleeping, and there’ll be a big ring of ducks sleeping around him.”

Smith, himself, even found an unusual best friend. “I have a donkey named Mr. Tickle. He’s probably the smartest animal I’ve ever encountered, much smarter than the horses, but he’s very emotional,” he says. “I’m a grown man, and I’m sitting there loving this donkey [who] wants hugs every night before bed.”

And then there’s the 150-pound dairy goat who wants to sit in Smith’s lap like a dog. “Most people think we’re crazy,” he says, “and we may be, but it’s what we do.”

Hop Along

Like many young people, Addy Buck grew up loving animals. Dogs, horses, bunnies — she loved them all and learned a lot about caring for different species through 4-H Club. Unlike many animal lovers, though, Buck has parlayed that passion into a business. The rabbitry she runs from her Portage County home is called Buck’s Bunny Barn, but her love of animals remains pure, even with several Best of Breed awards under her belt.

“The bunnies are my pets,” she says. “I don’t consider them a commodity.”

After giving birth to her daughter three years ago, Buck decided to start breeding mini lops — whose ears fall to the sides like pigtails — to have something that was all her own. “When you’re a new mom, you share everything,” she says.

Before long, Buck and her husband also welcomed a son — and three alpacas, two pygmy goats and three dogs to the family. That’s on top of the 25 or so bunnies Buck keeps for showing and breeding. After she selects her show bunnies, she sells some to 4-H students at a discount or otherwise finds good homes for the rest — always with the caveat to return them if owners can no longer care for them.

“Rabbits are considered herd animals,” she says. They wanted to get only one alpaca and one goat, but Buck learned that just one will get stressed and stop eating. So the herd grew.

Buck’s 3-year-old daughter, Ava, chose the neutered male goats as pets. “I’d always loved them and thought they were fun,” Buck says.

She has to be careful who grazes with whom because of some touchy personality conflicts. “The alpacas get along really well with the dogs,” Buck says. “But the goats are totally different. The new [alpaca] is afraid of goats because he’s not seen goats before. And my little pygmy thinks he’s huge, so he’ll rear up and butt heads.”The peacemaker in the group is Buck’s cane corso mastiff, Lucy. They call her “Mama Lu” because she is so maternal with everyone, including Ava, who she is always looking for and following around the house. “She and my mastiff actually have the strongest bond,” Buck says. “Ever since I brought her home, she and my dog have been inseparable.”