Byron's Bear (or How to Mess With the Provost)

When Lord Byron arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge he was told to send his dog home as keeping dogs on campus was against school rules. More than a little irked, and desperate for a pet, Byron scoured the college policy manual and found no references to a prohibition on keeping bears. Job done!

It is not reported exactly how Byron got a bear (they had been extirpated from the U.K. about 500 years earlier), but he did get a bear, which stayed with him in his dorm room. Byron regularly took it on leashed walks, generally terrifying fellow students and faculty.

Byron apparently had a lot of pets over the course of his life. As Percy Shelley noted :

"Lord B's establishment consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all of these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the masters of it."

"...I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circean Palace was defective, and that in a material point. I have just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian Crane"