Capybaras can be interesting indoor pets. I know of several that were perfectly behaved and not much more challenging than a clever dog. Dobby was not one of those. He was about as naughty as they come, and proud of it!

Capybara youngsters may not be chill, but they are fun and manageable. Like baby tigers and polar bears, capybaras become more challenging as they mature. As with human children, they can develop adult personalities substantially different from their innocent childhood persona.

When he was very young, he had the run of the entire house. Except for some minor chewing, he was well-behaved. As he approached one year old, cold weather restricted him to the house during freezing weather. Under duress, Sir Naughty managed to quickly sully every indoor space and by springtime his access to the house was reduced to a corner of the kitchen that included the door to the back yard.

The following video is in January 2010, shortly after the freezing weather that caused us to set up an X-pen in the kitchen. That’s a hamster in the cage, and there are a couple guinea pigs in a cage behind him. As he grew and needed more space, they migrated to another room. About a year later, this area was remodeled into a relatively indestructible pen.

Every once in a while, somebody goofed and he managed to escape the kitchen. As an adult, Dobby marked territory by dribbling urine as he walked. While it is possible to make a capybara understand a command such as “Get out!” it is nearly impossible to make them obey. Wild animals have enormous egos and don’t accept the dominance of the human species. The narrator in the following video is frustrated and powerless.

By now, he had an outdoor pen, heated in winter. We cleaned his kitchen area every night after he was moved outside for the evening. We washed all those rugs (including the rabbit), cleaned his bowls, and mopped the floor.

This is January, 2011, about a year after the toy video.

Dobby turned into a real grubber. Milk splashing, grain spilling, vegetable juice everywhere, and mud. Did you know that when mud dries it turns into dirt? We cleaned that space nightly throughout his life. You can tell the older photos by the wood floors (Oh no!) even if you can’t see the X-pen.

Capybaras love mud. Their fur is sparse, so in the wild they take mud baths to protect their tough leathery skin from hot summer sun.

Wood floors do not love mud. The cleaning crew does not love buckets of bamboo and sticky corn juice. Still, we had to leave the door open, because if it closed and latched, Dobby would panic and try to eat his way out by chewing up the door frame. In freezing weather, it was dangerous for him to be stuck outdoors.

What’s worse than mud? Poop! When Dobby learned he could get our attention by pooping in the kitchen, nightly cleanup became mighty unpleasant. Capybaras are herbivores, and people with guinea pigs understand how that translates to enormous amounts of excrement. Each photo below is one day of poop, not including what he deposited indoors.

Got it? Let’s play a game with the next photos. It’s called Where’s The Poop. These photos are from 2014-2015. Note the linoleum floor and solid walls in some photos. One of the photos includes a bonus bird seed “spill.”

Here’s a bonus video, and at the end you can see him pull the door open by himself. It’s not pleasant leaving the door open in freezing, snowy weather, but as an older capybara facing his third winter, he knew to come in when his feet got cold. Younger capybaras don’t seem to understand the danger, and those are the ones who get frostbite. I cringe when I see capybaras in snow, because we have heard of so many frostbite cases, some fatal.

Not all capybaras are as naughty as Dobby. I’m certain that is why he was so popular, and he never failed to perform. We remodeled our kitchen to accommodate him, and for the most part, our setup worked. From time to time, somebody would fail to close a door and he never missed an opportunity to explore the house.

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This post was brought to you by Stacy’s Funny Farm, a non-profit pet sanctuary and former home of Dobby the capybara. We hope you will be inspired to make a donation, maybe even more than two dollars. We especially appreciate monthly giving- the PayPal portal offers that option. If you want to help but are short on cash, head over to Dobby’s YouTube channel. We’re monetized and those ads pay out nicely, so please watch, share, and subscribe. If you didn’t watch the videos, please go back and click on each one! No need to watch all the way to the end. Thanks!

Stacy’s Funny Farm is a §501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

stacysfunnyfarm@gmail.com     EIN 47-1397412