A series of social media posts by a young man showing himself engaged in a number of activities with a mongoose he has adopted as a pet has triggered warnings by one of the country’s most senior veterinarians and a terrestrial biologist about the associated health and safety risks.

Dr Paul Cadogan, who operates a veterinary clinic in May Pen, Clarendon, and well-known wildlife expert Damion Whyte issued the caution as the series of posts appears to be influencing people to try to domesticate the predatory omnivores.

“As far as diseases are concerned, the one that raises concern when it comes to the mongoose is rabies,” Dr Cadogan said.

Although he acknowledged that Jamaica is rabies-free, he said that no one can say for sure if mongoose carry the viral disease.

“If they were carrying that disease we would only find out about it if there is an encounter [with a human] and we get to test the animal,” added Dr Cadogan, who has been a veterinarian for more than 30 years.

“We are surrounded by rabies-endemic countries, and even though we have not seen any cases of rabies in Jamaica, with trafficking in animals, you never know what might happen; animal trafficking is always a threat to our disease-free status,” he said.

“We talk about research being done as to the status of these animals, but it hasn’t happened yet,” added Dr Cadogan.

“There’s also the possibility of them spreading leptospirosis because they can carry and spread it. As you know, that it is a serious disease that can be deadly to people who contract it,” he added.

In the series of videos, the young man, who has named the mongoose Pixel, shows the animal being bathed and cleaned by him, in bed with him, being fed, and generally crawling all over him or running around inside a house with him sitting and talking to the small terrestrial mammal, which lets out what sounds like screeches.

The posts have become somewhat popular, with some viewers expressing a desire to get one of the mammals or enquiring how they can go about doing so.

However, Whyte, a final-year PhD student studying zoology at The University of the West Indies, and Dr Cadogan are urging caution.

“Mongoose are an invasive species, so you don’t want to encourage them, even though they were brought here deliberately. They have carved out their niche at the expense of some of our other wildlife,” Dr Cadogan said.

He said he had encountered Jamaicans in the past who have kept mongoose as pets.

“My concern, and I advised them accordingly, is that while the mongoose looked to be in good health, these are wild animals. When they’re babies they might be nice and cuddly and playful, but when they get older and their instincts start to kick in, there could be the risk of injury, and even if it’s not to the person who is keeping the mongoose, who the mongoose has a bond with, it can be other people or other animals,” the veterinarian said.

“They can be very aggressive when they are defending their territory, their young or whatever. So that’s the main concern — having to take responsibility for anything happening. And, of course, mongoose are predators, they’ll kill birds. Sure they will kill rodents, but they will also kill chickens. So if you are encouraged to have them around, there are those concerns,” he said.

Whyte agreed and pointed out that the decrease in Jamaican iguana population resulted from the introduction of the Indian mongoose to the island in the mid-1800s to control rats, snakes, and other pests on sugar cane plantations.

Local scientists, he said, had for decades thought that the Jamaican iguana was extinct until 1990 when a wild pig hunter found an injured iguana in the Hellshire hills in St Catherine.

“The hunter brought it to Hope Zoo and that spawned the Headstart Programme,” Whyte told the Jamaica Observer.

The programme includes monitoring of the iguana population to guide conservation plans; predator control, which entails removing a percentage of the predator species, such as stray dogs, from the iguanas’ natural habitat; and supplementation, which involves creating and maintaining viable, artificial nesting sites for the iguanas, which are listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

“Mongoose like to dig up the iguana eggs and eat them, or when the iguanas are born, they eat the hatchlings,” Whyte explained. “So now, after the eggs hatch we take the hatchlings to the zoo where they are kept for up to three years and then returned to the wild.”

Whyte, whose social media posts on environmental issues under the name Rooster’s World enjoy a huge audience, said that in tandem with the Headstart Programme, the country operates a Trap Programme to capture mongoose preying on iguana nests.

“Each week we have teams in the Hellshire hills where the iguanas nest. Over the years we have captured hundreds of mongoose,” he said.

Asked what is done with the animals when they are caught, Whyte said they are put down.

“But they breed fast and are very smart. One of the things that keeps them surviving is that they are omnivores, they eat fruits and other animals so they can survive well in harsh conditions,” he noted.

“We now see a lot of them in Kingston. They are good at living around humans. They are aggressive and will fight off cats. Also, because they are wild animals, they can turn around and bite people,” he said.

Like Dr Cadogan, Whyte highlighted the danger mongoose pose to other species and pointed to the Jamaican poorwill and the Jamaican petrel — two birds that nested on the ground and are long considered extinct because invasive species, including the mongoose, preyed on their nests.

Scientists say that the Jamaican poorwill has not been recorded since 1860, while the petrel was last collected in 1879. They also said that searches for the petrel between 1996 and 2000 ended without success.

“I know about three persons so far who have mongoose as pets. I know because they ask what to feed it and other people are now asking how to get them,” Whyte told the
Sunday Observer, adding that some of the comments under the social media posts about the mongoose Pixel indicate interest in acquiring the animals as pets.

Both Whyte and Dr Cadogan pointed out that there is no law in Jamaica preventing people from having mongoose as pets.

“So if they’re going to do so, they need to know the concerns and act accordingly,” Dr Cadogan emphasised.

“I recommend caution, caution, caution. It can turn nasty for other people, if not for the people keeping them as pets,” said Dr Cadogan, who also pointed out that mongoose carry a very pungent odour.

Responding to the reaction of the Pixel posts on social media, Dr Cadogan said: “It’s going to be difficult to prevent this trend… In order to do what this guy is doing you have to get them from they are babies, because if you try to catch an adult wild mongoose it can be extremely dangerous… [but] people need to know that they need to be cautious.”

Whyte supported that point, saying, “I can understand why people would want to have them, because when they are small they look cute and cuddly, but the key thing that people must remember is that these are wild animals.”

He suggested that the key to countering this trend is public education about the risks of trying to domesticate mongooses.