The Certification Magazine home office is closed today in honor of the U.S. holiday of Washington’s Birthday (also informally known as Presidents Day). We’ll be back tomorrow (Feb. 22), with more of the all-around IT certification goodness that you crave. Until then, please enjoy the following quiz.
In past years, we’ve done quizzes about Washington himself, and about the other 44 men to succeed him. (Remember, Grover Cleveland was both the 22nd and 24th president. So there have 46 presidents, but only 45 individuals have held the office). We did a quiz about first ladies, and one about the White House.
For 2022, we decided to crank out a quiz about an aspect of presidential life that gets more attention during some presidencies, and almost none at all during other: Does the president have a pet? And what do we know, if anything, about that animal (or animals)?
1. Which U.S. president briefly had two grizzly bear cubs as pets?
2. Three presidents did not keep pets while in office. Two of those are James K. Polk and Andrew Johnson. Who is the third?
3. Which president had a pet guinea pig Named Fighting Bob Evans?
4. Which president kept the most pets while in office?
5. Which consecutively serving presidents owned, between them, 16 different dogs across thirteen different breeds?
6. How many presidents had multiple pets with the name (in some form or other) “Peter”?
7. Which president purchased a horse after it defeated him in an impromptu street race through Washington, D.C.?
8. Which president’s pet cat, Siam, was the first documented Siamese cat to be owned in the United States?
9. Which presidential parrot outlived the president who owned her?
10. Which president was an active and engaged dog breeder, who kept hunting dogs with the names (among others) Sweet Lips, Scentwell, Vulcan, Drunkard, Taster, and Tippler?
ANSWERS
1. Thomas Jefferson. The bear cubs were a gift from explorer Zebulon Pike, who led two expeditions into the Louisiana Purchase at Jefferson’s behest. Jefferson soon donated the cubs to a Philadelphia museum, noting in a letter to a granddaughter that the animals were “too dangerous and troublesome for me to keep.”
2. Donald Trump. Trump, who is on the record as disliking dogs, did not have any pets during his presidency.
3. Theodore Roosevelt. Fighting Bob Evans was named in honor of Robley D. Evans, a distinguished American naval commander and contemporary of Roosevelt’s.
4. Calvin Coolidge. During his presidency, Coolidge is known to have kept 44 pets — a number of which were only briefly maintained. Among his impressive menagerie were a bobcat, a wallaby, a black bear, two lion cubs (named Tax Reduction and Budget Bureau), a pygmy hippopotamus, a donkey, a duiker, and two different raccoons.
5. Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hoover owned a Belgian Shepherd, a German Shepherd, two Fox Terriers, a Scotch Collie, a Canadian Eskimo Dog, an Irish Wolfhound, a setter, and a Norwegian Elkhound. Roosevelt had two Scottish Terriers, a German Shepherd, a Llewellyn Setter, an Old English Sheepdog, a Great Dane, and a Bullmastiff.
6. Three. Theodore Roosevelt had a terrier named Pete and a rabbit named Peter Rabbit. Warren G. Harding had a canary named Petey and a squirrel named Pete. Calvin Coolidge had a Wirehair Fox Terrier named Peter Pan and a canary named Peter Piper.
7. Ulysses S. Grant. Grant, who kept seven horses and two ponies, named the horse Butcher’s Boy because it beat him despite pulling a butcher’s wagon.
8. Rutherford B. Hayes. The cat was sent to Hayes in 1878 by the American Consul in Siam.
9. Polly. The macaw parrot was technically the pet of Dolley Madison, wife of James Madison. Macaw parrots can live for as long as 50 years, and both Polly and Dolley were alive and well when James died at age 85 in 1836.
10. George Washington. Washington also kept a greyhound named Cornwallis, after the British general who surrendered to Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau at Yorktown.
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