Cutest Pet Contest

Our cutest pet winner for 2023 is Beamer, an 18 year old green iguana. His owner Monica Harmon sent us this funny story of Beamer’s exploits to share with you.

Over the past 14 years that he’s been a member of our family, he has been the cause of a lot of strife and more than a few heated family “discussions”. (He isn’t the easiest of pets to own and both my husband and our young adult sons have had many misgivings about Beamer being a member of the family for so long.) Which leads me to a “cute” story.

About 6 years ago, when we were living on our 5-acre farm in Vancouver, WA, I let Beamer out on the back deck to sun himself on a particularly warm day. This was part of his daily routine in the summers when the weather was nice; he would “ask” to go outside by scratching at the sliding glass door until someone let him out. After a few hours, I went to check on him and couldn’t find him. I searched for a while with no luck, really started panicking and enlisted the help of my husband and two sons. No one could find him! Our neighbors and their kids came over to help us look for him, but since we had about 200 trees to look in, it quickly became dark with no sight of Beamer.

Every day for the next two months, I spent hours searching for Beamer and calling him (he does know his name). I posted flyers, asked the neighbors repeatedly and even increased my search to the 20 acres of forest behind our house. Finally I admitted defeat and allowed my husband to move Beamer’s large enclosure out of the house and into the barn. Shortly thereafter, we were having our house painted and one of the painters frantically ran up to me and exclaimed that a very large and scary lizard like animal had jumped out at him from inside the bushes. Well, I thought he had been put up to this by my husband so I just laughed it off, much to the painter’s surprise. Unbeknownst to me, the other painter had frantically ran in the other direction, finding my husband on the other side of the house and exclaimed the same thing. My husband thought I had put the painter up to it! When they both got us together and we realized they were telling the truth, I burst into tears of joy and started running around trying to find Beamer, as it had now been 10-15 minutes since his sighting. At the same time, my husband also started crying because he had been so happy to be living a life free of an often irritable 4 foot male iguana, that the idea of him coming back home made him shed tears of sorrow. Within an hour, I found the tree Beamer had been living in all summer, finally got him out and was shocked to watch him run the fastest I’ve ever seen him, making a beeline from the trees and straight through our open front door and directly into his room in the house. Since then, he has never strayed very far from our home at all and I doubt he ever will. He will always remember that fateful summer when he went just a little too far from home and didn’t get his daily warm bath and fresh green salad.