PEOPLE Pets | Sit. Stay. Play!

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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In recent weeks, we've featured stories about some very unusual roommates: skunks, hedgehogs and even crocodiles as pets! They're not your typical house animals — and, as we learned from people who own them, they have their own specific rewards and challenges. We've also heard your comments on Facebook: One user wrote about our hedgehog story, "Please don't encourage people to keep any more wild animals from their natural habitat. Shame on you!" And, we want to know what YOU think: Should people keep exotic pets? Or should these animals only live at the zoo?

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Like many toddlers, 8-month-old Jensen takes comfort nuzzling into his mom's neck. But there's something definitely different about this foster child that Linda Sauvarin has taken under her wing: He's a wombat, a forest-dwelling animal found in Australia and Tasmania.

"He thinks I'm his wombat mum. He always buries his face in my neck," says Sauvarin, founder of the Warrandyte Wildlife Shelter, near Victoria, Australia. She rescued the little animal when his mother was hit and killed by a car at just 3 months old.

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Sonic the hedgehog has got nothing on Little Miss Satin Mirranda Hufflepuff. According to Melissa Gardner of Ypsilanti, Mich., her 2-year-old pet hedgehog "yawns like a tiny roaring lion and gives high fives with her front paw."

Maybe not what you’d expect from these quilled creatures, but then again, hedgehogs are much more than adorable novelties. Pet African hedgehogs, Algerian and White Bellied hybrids, are on average about the size of a guinea pig, typically to 1 lbs. and 5 to 8 inches long. They’re mostly nocturnal, mild-mannered animals whose quills aren’t barbed like those of porcupines. And, for a growing community of hedgehog owners, their beloved pets are unique, friendly companions.

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