Animal Rentals Blog

I know that Mother’s Day is not for a few weeks yet, but today I wanted to tell you a little bit about our “mama” here at Animal Rentals.  Her name is Mrs. Clean and she really takes care of me and all my exotic animal friends of Mindy’s Menagerie.  She is really loving, sweet, and small.  Mrs. Clean is a Hairless Rat.

A lot of people are scared of rats or think they are unclean or carry diseases.  But rats are actually very clean  and friendly and incredibly smart…maybe even as smart as monkeys!  When I typed that Mrs. Clean just said, “Yes, dear, we are as smart as monkeys but it is not polite to brag about it.”   I won’t argue, we never argue with “mama”.   She is always right and besides that we wouldn’t want to do anything to upset her because we love her so much.

Anyway, Mrs. Clean is like a cross between Mary Poppins and a schoolteacher and the world’s best grandma.  She loves all of us and she is always making sure we are comfortable and happy while we are traveling and that we have and do what we need.  She’s the one that always asks, “Did everyone use the bathroom before they got in the van?”  And, “Did you all remember to wash yourselves after touching the humans?”  And “Does anyone need a snack?  I’ve got some nice fruit and nuts right here.”

Back home at Animal Rentals, Mrs. Clean helps us and reminds us too.  You will often hear her say things like, “Purse, be sure to brush those big alligator teeth so you can keep your nice, white smile.”  And, “Let’s blow a fan on Chi-Chi the Chinchilla so he is not so hot while the rest of us are so cold.”  And “Bugsy, you Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches need to stop stealing Mindy’s cookies when she’s not looking.”  Mrs. Clean is the best!

She loves people, too…especially children.  She really enjoys traveling to all different types of parties, events and locations for our Animal Shows – she thinks birthday parties are the best because she adores kids and cake.  Her favorite part of working with Animal Rentals is meeting all the new people and hugging them while they hold her.  Most people don’t even realize that they are being hugged by Mrs. Clean – she is so light and gentle and soft!  They think they are just holding her but really, she is holding them right back.

That’s our “mama”, Mrs. Clean the Hairless Rat.  She just loves and cares about and cares for  and takes care of all of us.  We are lucky to have her.  Next time I’ll tell you about Mrs. Clean’s favorite philosophy and why “Bald is Beautiful”.

The past few weeks have been sort of strange and sad here at Animal Rentals since my Uncle, Mr. Adam Monk, passed away.   All of my human and exotic animal friends in Mindy’s Menagerie here sure miss him!  But it has been wonderful getting notes from people that knew him.  Uncle Monk was one monkey people never forgot meeting!

Uncle Monk was 43 when he left us – which is pretty old for a monkey.  Even though he lived to a ripe old age, people say that it is never long enough.  The sad truth is, though, that most animals just don’t live as long as humans do.  A lot of my tropical bird friends – like Ruby the African Grey Parrot or Piwackett the Scarlet Macaw – can live 60 to 75 years or longer!  And there are some whales, giant tortoises and other animals that live for more than 200 years.   But most domestic and exotic animals have a much shorter time on earth.  So we should be happy that Uncle Monk had 43 years, and an incredible life.

Dad, of course, misses Uncle Monk the most.  The two of them started Animal Rentals and built the business together.  Of course dad says he did it and Uncle Monk just helped, and of course Uncle Monk said that all the best ideas were his and he was the “real” boss.  I really miss all the great advice he gave me – like when I was learning to be an Organ Grinder monkey and Uncle Monk told me to never take the pennies from people, only the “big money”.  If someone ever handed him a penny while he was working he would actually throw it right to the ground.  If it wasn’t silver or green, he wouldn’t take it.  Lol!

Uncle Monk retired years ago, so he never traveled with us for our College Entertainment shows. But he certainly did his share of touring and working with lots of people and celebrities doing Animal Shows, charity events, theme parties, strolling entertainment, fairs, festivals, corporate parties, birthday parties, commercials, tv shows…you name it and Uncle Monk was there putting on a show and making people laugh and smile.  I am happy and proud to continue the work he started here at Animal Rentals and to carry on his legacy of making people laugh and smile.

Goodbye Uncle Monk…I love you and I miss you!

The other day was bath day here at Animal Rentals, and I got some great pictures of my dad and my uncle, Mr. Adam Monk.  I love seeing the two of them together, and dad loves reminiscing with Uncle Monk about “the old days”.  Uncle Monk is over 45 years old!  And he and dad have been together a REALLY long time…working, traveling and playing.  Uncle Monk doesn’t travel with us doing Animal Shows or College Entertainment any more, he says his days of being on the road are done and he just wants to relax and enjoy his retirement.  I LOVE traveling and don’t think I will EVER want to retire!  But Uncle Monk and I are completely different.

I guess Uncle Monk is really more of my brother than actually an uncle, since he was dad’s first monkey son.  But he is old and sort of crotchety – which dad tells me is a nicer way of saying cranky, lol – and certainly more like an uncle than a brother.  So he is Uncle Monk to me.

Uncle Monk has had an amazing life – even before he met dad.  He was born in the wild in the jungles of South America, and he was captured and kidnapped and SOLD when he was very young!  He traveled from village to village in small, bamboo cages being sold and traded until he finally came to America and met dad.  Dad likes to say that it was NOT love at first sight – lol.  But he and Uncle Monk grew to first respect then love each other, and together they built Animal Rentals from a highly demanded Organ Grinder act to a business that focuses on bringing people and exotic animals together in an educational and entertaining way.  I even think that it was Uncle Monk’s idea to do our Petting Zoos and Pony Rides. At least, HE says it was.  Dad just rolls his eyes and laughs whenever I ask him about it.

Anyway, I guess after such a long life filled with work and adventure Uncle Monk deserves to relax and be pampered in his retirement.  And he sure does love his bath time!  I don’t blame him, I do too!  What about you?  Do you love bath time too?

HAPPY NEW YEAR everybody!

I am tired but happy from my big New Year’s Eve night out with dad and lots of fun, dancing and new friends.  I would love to be sleeping right now, but dad says I need to make a New Year’s Resolution and share it with everyone so that I stick to it…so here I am, writing to you all about my New Year’s Resolution.

Ok, honestly, I don’t get the whole New Year’s Resolution thing.  Dad says it’s a promise you make to yourself so that you have a guideline and a plan to follow for the upcoming year.  Well let me tell you, a monkey brain doesn’t work like that.  Lol!  We live for the day…actually we live for the moment.  A monkey’s motto is “Do whatever feels good!”  We don’t do a lot of planning.

The above was written on January 1st.  Today is January 27th.  This is the perfect illustration to my point.  I have been “doing whatever feels good” for the last few weeks and totally forgot about finishing my blog post!  Talk about living in the moment – hahahaha!

Dad says I have the emotional maturity of a two year old child.  I’m not sure that’s a compliment, but I suppose it is true.  Us monkeys get easily excited and easily distracted.  It is such a big, wild, wonderful world out there how can anybody NOT get caught up in the thrill of the moment sometimes?  It is so easy to do!

Ok so back to the New Year’s Resolution.  Mine this year is to spend more time telling you all about my wonderful exotic animal friends and family at Animal Rentals and about all the fun we have living and playing and working together.  Sometimes I get so busy traveling around with dad to our College Entertainment shows, or working locally doing our Animal Shows, Petting Zoos and other fun events, that I forget to get online and share our stories with all of my wonderful human friends out there across the country.  Bad Mindy!  Lol.

The really exciting news that you may have already noticed, is that this year I am sharing my blog space with my human and exotic animal friends of Mindy’s Menagerie, and letting them post here too!  So one day you might read a post from me, another day a post from someone on our staff, and another day maybe even one from Casper the Albino Burmese Python or Cleopatra the Serval Cat or Mrs. Clean the Hairless Rat.  You never know who is going to want to pop in as a guest star here on my blog, so be sure to check back often and get to know us all better in 2015!

As Animal Rentals official Animal Ambassador, I love any organization that promotes the conservation and welfare of domestic and exotic animals.  Fortunately there are hundreds, even thousands, of just those types of organizations all over the world.  But out of all of them, my favorite is the one that is dedicated to me and my brothers and sisters like me – the Simian Society of America.

The Simian Society of America is dedicated to a lifetime of care for primates in captivity.   What that means is that they help people understand and care for us monkeys, and they help monkeys live the best life they possibly can.  How could I not love them?!  I am a lifetime member of the Simian Society of America, and they are my personal number one charity.  I even have an ad in one of their magazines!   So it was very exciting for me to take a break from our traveling College Entertainment and Exotic Animal Shows to attend the Simian Society’s National Convention Appreciation Day in early October.

The convention was in Branson, Missouri – about 8 1/2 hours from Chicago – so dad and I road-tripped it once again.  Once we got there, we had tons of fun hanging out and talking to people who love monkeys and other primates as much as we do.  And Dad and I got to give a good talk about living and working and traveling together.  But my favorite part of the whole thing was hanging out with other monkeys…it was awesome!  At home I get to spend time with my Uncle Monk – who tells wonderful stories about “the old days” – but at the convention I got to meet all sorts of different monkeys from all over the country.  AND I had a “date” with a really nice male monkey.  Dad says he is a prospective mate for me.  I don’t know about all of that, but it was nice to get to know him for a while.  Maybe we will see each other at next year’s convention.  Maybe sooner!

So now you’ve heard a little about my favorite charitable animal organization – the Simian Society of America.  What is your favorite animal charity and why?  How are you involved with it?

If you like hugs, then you are going to LOVE my friend Sahara the Fennec Fox.  She gives the best hugs ever, and she loves to cuddle.  She is a great cuddler.  And she’s cute.  Cute, cuddly, and huggable…no wonder everyone at our different types of Exotic Animal Shows love her so much!

But don’t let her quiet moments fool you.  Sahara is also an absolute bundle of energy when it is play time.  She and I have so much fun running and playing catch and jumping and wrestling around together!  She is only a year old so she still loves to play just as much as I do.   And she’d rather play with one of us than by herself.   That makes her a great friend and one of my favorites to travel with around the country doing our College Entertainment shows.

Fennec Foxes are really cute small animals with great big ears.  Their ears are like ten times the size of their heads.  Ok, not really, but they are really big.  And believe it or not those big ears aren’t just for hearing – which is so good that they can hear other animals moving around underground.  They actually act like air conditioners in a way, radiating their body heat away from them to keep them cooler in the desert heat.  Sahara and her relatives are actually from the Sahara desert and other very hot areas in North Africa.  But the desert can get pretty cold at night, so Fennec Foxes have a thick coat of fur to keep them warm.  So when the rest of us exotic animals are arguing about whether to turn on the air conditioner or the heater, Sahara is happy either way.

Sahara is one of the most popular animals at all of the parties, carnivals, college shows, corporate events, grand openings and all the other types of events our traveling zoo full of friends go to.  If you look at the pictures on my Facebook page, you’ll see lots of pictures of her cuddling with and hugging all the new people we are so lucky to meet all over the country.  Dad says that Sahara is all “sweetness and light”.  I’m not sure exactly what that means, but people sure do love her!   What do you think?

When you live with a bunch of different exotic animals from all different climates around the world, you argue a lot about where to set the thermostat.  Here at Animal Rentals we have temperature wars all year long.   A lot of my friends and I are from warm or tropical climates, so like it nice and toasty warm at home and we love the summertime.  But one of my friends likes it so cool that the rest of us think it is downright chilly!  I’m talking about my friend Chi-Chi the Chinchilla – who should have been named Chilly Willy!

Chi-Chi is a really nice guy with a great big family that he supports by working with us doing our Exotic Animal Shows, Petting Zoos, College Entertainment shows and Animal Displays.  Chi-Chi, his wife Camille, and all of his kids have the most beautiful fur coats I have ever seen.  And they are so soft!  Chinchilla fur is the softest fur of any animal.  But it is also really thick – which means Chi-Chi gets hot easily – which means Chi-Chi likes it cool outside – which is just the opposite of what I like!

Chinchillas are originally from high up in the Andes Mountains, where it is pretty cool all year round.  That’s why they need that thick, soft coat – to keep them warm.  People also like to stay warm with Chinchilla fur, and Chi-Chi’s ancient relatives almost became extinct because of it.  I’m glad they are still around – because they are really cool animals and Chi-Chi is a really good friend.  Chinchilla fur belongs on Chinchillas, not people!  Some people still raise Chinchillas for fur, but at least it is illegal to hunt them in the wild now.

Chi-Chi is looking forward to traveling around to colleges, parties, festivals and other events with us this fall as the weather cools down.  In the mean time, we help him out by cranking the air conditioning up whenever he gets too warm.  Helping each other be happy is what friends do, after all!

When you hang out with a bunch of camels, every day is hump day!  And with both Bactrian and Dromedary Camels as friends, I get plenty of both one hump AND two.

My friends Bradley, Kalisha and Chloe are Dromedaries – camels with just one hump.  Boe and Finnegan are Bactrian Camels with two humps.   There’s no room for them here in the city, of course, so these Chicagoland Camels all live together on a great big farm.  And just like me, they love to travel around the country and meet new people.  They work with me and my other exotic animal friends at Animal Rentals doing camel rides for children and adults, camel wagon hay rides for groups of people, and even camel races.  They are funny because they like to run, and they always argue about who is the fastest.  They also really like to give rides to people, and they argue about who walks the smoothest.  Come to think of it, they argue a lot about everything.  But it is a fun and happy arguing – more of a discussion than an actual fight.  I’ve never seen them ever get mad at each other.  They really all get along great.  Everybody loves what friendly, happy camels they are.

Have you ever gotten to ride a camel?  It’s a really cool feeling!  They sort of sway from side to side at the same time that they rock back and forth.  It is a very relaxing feeling for most people…and for most monkeys too!  Well, at least for me it is.  I love when they give me rides.

I never knew that there were so many interesting facts about Bactrian Camels and Dromedary Camels until I met this great group of friends.  You can learn a little more about Bradley, Kalisha, Chloe, Boe and Finnegan on my Mindy’s Menagerie page.  And you can learn how to meet them in person on our Animal Rentals Camel Adventures page.  Meanwhile, comment below to tell us which you prefer…one hump or two!

What a great summer it’s been so far!  Even though dad and I are taking a break from traveling the country doing our College Entertainment shows, we have been really busy appearing at fairs and festivals, private parties, trade shows and lots of other fun events.  And of course there is always plenty to do working at the office and taking care of all of my exotic animal friends.  But this summer we are also making a lot of fun changes behind the scenes too.

The most fun change for me so far is re-naming the IQ Zoo to Mindy the Monkey’s Menagerie!  It’s the most fun because it was my idea.  We call it Mindy’s Menagerie for short, but I like the full name better.  All of my exotic animal friends are still included, and we are even adding a couple new friends soon.  But I think the name Mindy the Monkey’s Menagerie really describes us better.  After dad read me the definition from the dictionary, I knew it had to be our new name.

The dictionary says that a menagerie is a collection of wild animals that are kept specifically to be shown to the public.  Doesn’t that sound just like us?  Of course we do more than just let people look at us…interacting with people is so much fun and an important part of my mission to educate and entertain as an Animal Ambassador.  So even though we are more than just ‘props’, menagerie is a perfect name for my group of exotic animal friends.

So Mindy the Monkey’s IQ Zoo is now Mindy’s Menagerie.  You can still learn all sorts of fun facts and interesting things about my friends and I at the Mindy’s Menagerie page.  And you can still pick your favorite exotic animals for your next party or event there.  Everything is still the same but the name!

We have another birthday to be excited about here at Animal Rentals!  My friend Jesse James the Geoffroy Cat turns 12 years old today.  I hope we get to celebrate with more cake and presents.  I really like birthday cake…it is one of my favorite foods!

I just realized that I don’t know if Jesse likes birthday cake or not.  I’ve never seen him eat any.  Not even at my birthday party.  I’ll have to ask him if he likes cake.  But I’ll have to catch him at the right time, because you never know whether Jesse James is going to be happy to see you or not!

Jesse’s a great guy and all, but he’s still a little on the wild side.  He doesn’t ever really seem to completely relax…even when he’s just lying there, he is always alert and watching everything.  Out of all of my exotic animal friends, Jesse James is the toughest.  He says that all Geoffroy’s Cats are like that, and that they will never be as tame as domestic house cats – even though they are about the same size.  Jesse thinks people should remember that small doesn’t always mean cute and cuddly. ..sometimes it means wild and fierce.

I don’t know if Jesse is really as fierce as he thinks he is, but it’s true that when we do our animal shows at parties, festivals, college entertainment programs and all of the other exciting events that we travel to, people are really drawn to Jesse James because they say he looks like a miniature leopard or cheetah.  It is easy for them to forget that he is a wild animal because of his size.  The rest of my exotic animal friends and I never forget that, but sometimes people do.

Even though Jesse James likes to act tough, he is a really nice guy and a loyal friend – and everyone here at Animal Rentals really likes him a ton!  So we all want to wish him the happiest 12^th birthday ever!  Won’t you join us in saying “Happy Birthday Jesse James”?!