After two days, the owner awoke in the night when he heard her scratching at his desk.

Martin, Nitze’s roommate, recalls that the chinchillas would “ram their heads through the cardboard flap” to try to escape from their cage.

One day, Nitze purposely let Franklin, one of the three chinchillas he has kept at Harvard, run around his common room.

While he was on the loose, Franklin chewed on a wire.

“He was sort of twitching,” Nitze recalls, then he “flopped over.”

Though Franklin survived unscathed, Nitze says that it was “the awfullest thing I’d ever seen.”

Beyond electrocution scares, others say that dorm rooms are not suited to keeping pets due to their small size.

The python owner only kept Monty in his room for the year that he lived in DeWolfe, where his snake could live in a large closet in his bedroom.

The rat owner agrees that small rooms are problematic for pet ownership. “I really wanted a cat,” she says, noting that her mother kept a cat in her own Harvard dorm room. (Breaking the no-pets policy “is a family tradition, I guess,” she says.) “But I thought that it would not be fair to a cat to live in such a small space.”

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

Some students see these difficulties as reasons to support the no-pets rule, while others wish that the policy was more lenient.

“I guess the school has to enforce a policy, because you can’t have everyone in a dorm keeping ferrets. It would get all messy and smelly,” Nitze says.

The rat owner says that she supports the rule against pets, even though she is breaking it.

“I think the College policy, while probably not intended for the welfare of pets, helps out because college students are generally irresponsible and probably wouldn’t take the best care of a pet,” she says.

The student who kept a python believes that caged animals such as rodents and reptiles should be permitted.