Hello everyone,

I am new here and very excited to be a member. I am introducing myself here but have lots of questions and will post them in several parts of the forum to answer them over the next few weeks. This seems like a forum full of very nice and helpful people and I am very excited to be a part of it. Stay tuned.

So a little bit about me. I live in Utah with my wife and four kids. All my kids have ADHD and/or autism and a lot of anxiety due to past history from their lives before us. They are amazing children, however, and we could not ask for any better. Our family is full of animal lovers, however, and my kids are wonderful with the animals and love to help care for them. My two oldest have goals to become vets in the future due to this love of animals currently. In turn, the animals are very therapeutic and wonderful for us all.

I do not currently have a husky but do have a couple other dogs (havanese and chihuahua) as well as a room for animals considered more exotic that are quite easy to care for (fish, leopard geckos, ball pythons, dart frogs, and tree frogs) and one son keeps guinea pigs as well. I have kept many breeds of dog in the past and have always had them. I would love to get a husky and plan to get one this year as a reward for finishing off my education and CPA testing finally. They have always been my favorite breed of dog and I believe it is finally time to take the leap. I am in the planning stage now and will be collecting supplies over the next few months so I am ready when the time comes.

Again, I am extremely excited to be on here and to begin to plan for our new addition and look forward to learning from you all and hopefully adding some knowledge in the future when I have more.

Thank you

Welcome to the forum! Huskies can be a handful so thank you for doing your homework before getting one. I wish more people would.

Payson (or at least I'm assuming that's your name )
A note in light of a couple of things you mention. Huskies are often *VERY* prey driven and virtually any smaller animal is prey. I live in a house with three Huskies and three cats - but one of my cats (an addition who wandered in as an adult off the desert) is seemingly prey for my dogs. They haven't connected yet so I'm not sure how serious the dogs are, I just know that the cat is extremely 'skitzy' around them.

The reason for the note, if your kids all have ADHD and anxiety issues, I'd think very carefully about bringing a Husky into a house that already has other small animals. Anxiety when your Husky destroys one of his guinea pigs - well, not too much (very tongue in cheek)

As a kid i bred rats. 2 were pets and their babies got sold as snake food or fed to my monitor. My female rat named brain used to ride around the house on our rhodesian ridgeback.

So yeah the Guinea pigs could be an issue or may not be. They say with a small puppy it takes 90 minutes in the first interaction to be able to tell if it will or wouldnt work. And id like to say its false because of how squirt is but the very first thing squirt did at 8 weeks old when i got her was attack our full grown rottie so it really did actually hold true because she cant be around anything alive thats non human.

But the dog and Guinea pigs probably will need to be kept separate

Thank you for the advice and help with that. I am not one to really mix animals where they can get to each other.

The Guinea pigs stay in my 13-year-old boy's bedroom behind a locked door (with a keypad and code). That is in the basement behind another closed door and the dogs are not allowed down there because I also have ball pythons, leopard geckos, fish, and frogs down there as well as feeders for the ones who need live feeders in our pet room (also behind a locked door with keypad). The only animals we keep upstairs with us and the dogs are two turtles.

Thank you for the advice and concern with that. It is very good information to have.

I like reptiles, i always have but now i have none. Kaa i had to give away to the Baltimore aquarium when i moved. She was a 9ft (nose to tip of tail) ornate nile monitor. I also had a tank that i gave to some kids i used to babysit for that was a half water half land setup with several geckos a green basilisk 4 dart frogs and south american cichlids. I also had 5 types of piranha.

My dogs never bothered the reptiles but kaa tried to eat one of my cats once.