Enslaved by Ducks: How One Man Went from Head of the Household to Bottom of the Pecking Order

By: Bob Tarte

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Synopsis: When Bob Tarte left the Michigan suburbs for the country, he was thinking peace and quiet. He'd write his music reviews in the solitude of his rural home on the outskirts of everything. Then he married Linda. She wanted a rabbit. How much trouble, he thought, could a bunny be? Well, after the bunny chewed its way through their electrical wires and then hid inside the wall, Bob realized that he'd been outwitted. But that was just the beginning. There were parrots, more rabbits, then ducks and African geese. The turkeys, stranded on a nearby road, fighting for their lives. The starlings. The sad, ugly duck for sale for 25 cents. One day Bob looked around and saw he was not only outnumbered, but that he'd become a servant to an extremely demanding family: Stanley Sue, a gender-switching African grey parrot; Hector, a cantankerous shoulder-sitting Muscovy duck; Howard, an amorous ring-necked dove; Chloe, a mallard who learned to limp; and a host of others. And, against every instinct in him, Bob became their slave. He read all the classic animal books--The Parrot Who Owns Me, The Dog Who Rescues Cats, Arnie the Darling Starling, That Quail Robert, The Cat Who Came for Christmas--about the joys of animals, the touching moments. But none revealed what it was really like to live with an unruly menagerie. This hilarious memoir gives us the other side--about a man who, against all bets, was converted to a doting and proud animal lover.