The 5 Worst Celebrity Pets
They say that pets tend to look like their owners, and apparently, they tend to act like them, too. Your average celebrity is no stranger to public meltdowns, so neither are their pets. That’s not to say every pet isn’t a good boy or girl — some are just more spoiled than others.
Courtney Love’s Pomeranian
Jezebel’s celebrity coverage has historically focused on sexual predators and only the juiciest of breakups, so it really says something that in 2019, they devoted an entire write-up to a disastrous dinner with Courtney Love’s pomeranian, Bell. One of their tablemates, actor Bryan Safi, complained that the dog was “screaming, the whole time,” “running everywhere” and got caught around the neck on a heat lamp. “She’s like, ‘I don’t know,’ and puts the dog on the table,” where she may or may not have fed it packets of artificial sweetener. Despite its apparently questionable diet and Love’s apparently questionable history of keeping pets alive, Bell hung on until 2024. Godspeed, you yippy monstrosity.
Salvador Dali’s ‘Ocelot’
It’s unclear whether the cat Dali was frequently seen walking in the ‘60s, Babou, was actually an ocelot or, as he once told a frightened woman in a restaurant, a painted house cat, but it was definitely a nightmare. It routinely terrorized Dali’s favorite Paris hotel, once escaping its owner to the panic of the rest of the occupants and another time puking all over its revolving door. At a local art gallery, Babou pissed all over a bunch of 17th-century engravings, forcing Dali to offer some of his own art as compensation.
Alan Ball’s Macaws
“Commencing in or about late 2009, on a daily basis, Tarantino began hearing ear-splitting shrieks and screams emanating from defendant’s property,” read paperwork from a 2011 lawsuit filed by Quentin Tarantino against his neighbor, Oscar-winning screenwriter Alan Ball. It wasn’t some kind of Illuminati-related sacrifice — it was Ball’s pet macaws. They eventually reached a settlement, but not before Tarantino made public details of how “the exotic birds’ squawking, which occurs daily and continues over a span of seven or eight hours each day, is injurious to Tarantino’s health and offensive to his senses such that it obstructs Tarantino’s free use of his property and interferes with his comfortable enjoyment of life," which is arguably a public service, if anything.
Nicolas Cage’s Cobras
In 2003, Cage regaled viewers of The Late Show with David Letterman with tales of his murderous king cobras, casually describing how the pair of snakes attempted to hypnotize him before lunging at him. This was somehow not the reason Cage ended up rehoming the snakes in a zoo — it was because, after he told the story on Letterman, “the neighborhood wasn’t too pleased that I had cobras.” We can’t imagine why.
Tippi Hedren’s Lions
After observing a vacant home overrun with lions on a trip to Africa, actress Tippi Hedren decided that there was no difference between that and her Hollywood estate and adopted several feline killing machines, planning to make a movie about them. This went exactly how you’d expect, and among the victims of the many injuries on the set of what became known as the world’s most dangerous movie was Hedren’s own daughter, a then-14-year-old Melanie Griffith, who was mauled badly enough to require 50 stitches and reconstructive surgery. At that point, it’s less of a case of “bad pet” as “bad owner.”