PEOPLE Pets | Sit. Stay. Play!

The lions in Out of Africa. The vipers in Snakes on a Plane. The maggots on every franchise of CSI. They were all handled by Jules Sylvester, an animal trainer and snake wrangler who is Hollywood's go-to man for things scary, dangerous and, as he would put it, "creepy-crawly." He has been working in Hollywood for 44 years, and in all that time, Sylvester has never been bitten!

"A far as I know, in my business, I'm the only one that hasn't been nailed yet by a venomous snake," Sylvester tells PEOPLEPets.com. "When you're paying an actor $20 million, they're not going to want to deal with someone that's been bitten all the time. That's like a race car driver that smashes his car every time he goes around."

Sylvester's extensive resume began with a stint a snake park in Nairobi, Kenya, where he grew up. There was no TV around on the family farm, just animals, and from his childhood, Sylvester — who turns 59 on Friday — cultivated a respect and understanding of them.

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Like most 25-year-old's, Finnish art student Mari Kasurinen is an '80s baby with a love for all things pop — a love so strong, she's even found a legitimate reason to keep playing with one of the most nostalgic toys of the era, the My Little Pony dolls. Kasurinen has created a series of figures based on the dolls, fashioning them into icons like Superman, Lady Gaga and Elvis (as a unicorn!), among others.

"I've always been interested in pop art and popular culture itself," said Kasurinen, who paints, sketches and sculpts. "The fact that I could transform a human character into pony form was really exciting."

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Splice together Edward Scissorhands and Dr. Seuss, and you wind up with Ick Chu, a shrub-happy homeowner in Melbourne, Australia. Chu has sculpted more than 20 life-size topiary animals in his garden, a whimsical zoo that features dinosaurs, giraffes, eagles, elephants and a jolly red rhino with a sign that reads "You Can Ride Me."

"People ride on it nearly every day," Chu told reporters in Melbourne. Chu bought the home 11 years ago and immediately gutted the old garden to make way for his bushy band of animals. "Kids love it. They don’t even have to come in and ask."

To create his menagerie, Chu usually spent around five hours a day snipping and pruning, and worked for four years on his giant elephant alone. He started out with an eagle, moved on to bears and didn’t stop until his garden was a full-blown tourist attraction.

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Bai Ling misses her cat. The actress is on the set of her upcoming movie Circle of Pain in Austin, Texas, and on a recent day off, she went to visit the zoo, where she saw cheetahs, the ancestors of her pet feline Quiji.

Yes, Quiji (pronounced chee-jee) is part cheetah. Ling says that the cat, whose father was a cheetah and whose mother was a domestic cat, came as a gift from an ex-boyfriend. The rare mix, now about a year old, was purchased from a breeder for approximately $30,000.

"In my previous life, I was a cheetah or leopard or some sort of really wild and dangerous animal in nature," Ling tells PEOPLEPets.com. "But the thing is, Quiji is really the most affectionate, even compared to human beings."

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As sometimes happens to Internet sensations, Shreve Stockton encountered blustering criticism as her newsletter and blog, The Daily Coyote, started to reach more and more people. "What you're doing is sacrilege," anonymous commenters would say about Stockton's relationship with her coyote, Charlie. "He's going to kill your cat or eat your face off in the middle of the night."

Stockton, a 32-year-old writer and photographer who has been documenting the past two years of her life with Charlie, was not looking to care for a wild animal when she first encountered her coyote as a pup. Her boyfriend Mike, a government trapper with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, whose job it was to kill coyotes in order to protect livestock, found Charlie orphaned in his den hole, so young he was still blind. For some inexplicable reason, Mike was compelled to take Charlie to Stockton, and after much deliberation, Stockton decided to care for Charlie.

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Just down the street from the PEOPLEPets.com offices in Manhattan, an 11 lb., 70-year-old lobster awaits his fate. He is waiting to go back to the sea waters off Maine's coast, where he was caught before being brought to Oceana restaurant.

The saga began when Ryan Sutton, a writer for Bloomberg, opined that the lobster (named Larry, George or Peter, depending on who you ask) deserved to be spared from ending up as someone's $275 dinner.

Larry's age was determined as 70 because of his weight, which is an indicator of age, and at $25/lb., he was on the menu for $275. At least five of his pounds is probably shell, which means that he would have yielded about five-and-a-half pounds of meat, mostly claw.

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Meet the basilisk: They call it the Jesus Christ lizard because it can "walk" (but really, run) on water as it flees from predators. Fear + momentum + toes that can spread out to increase the surface area of their feet = awesome.

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