Why ask Santa for a pony when you could order one through the mail?
There was a time when you could order live animals from a catalog (or from the back of a comic book!)
I cringe when I think about it for several reasons, not just the pets-as-X-mas-gifts thing (as pets should never be an impulse purchase ever) but also what those animals endured during shipping...what if a sudden snow storm caused the mail truck to get stuck & stall on the road? Not like the mailman would have had any food & water to give to the animals. Animals being shipped in un-heated feight train cars. Again, certain many of them froze to death before reaching thier final destination.
Here's an example of what live critters were offered from the 1955 Speigel catalog:
Mynah birds...back then no one was breeding them so the ones featured here would have been live captured in Asia, shipped over via boat and then shipped out again to customers. Mynah's are great mimics but super messy (they eat fresh fruit rather than seeds so hello squirty liquid poo all over the cage) so I bet many didn't last long as household pets
More exotic birds (again, not bred domestically but taken from the wild) puppies & a donkey! I know many little girls wished for a pony for x-mas but a donkey? Who ever wished for that LOL
Also gotta love the "Surprise Them!" text on the page...yeah with a live animal that the Mom would usually end up taking care of.
And like any decent minded dog breeder would provide puppies for mail-order...so all the puppies probably came from Puppy Mills (easy enough to get CKC/AKC papers for puppies no matter where they come from sadly)
Cannot even imagine how many of the them that ended up dumped in the local pound come first week of the New Year once the novelty wore off.
Monkeys & Ponies, oh my!
Guess back then they didin't realize all the diseases monkeys could carry (TB, hepatitus to name a few)
And how many people ordered a pony only to realize that they couldn't keep it in the back yard of thier suburban home due to by-laws or lack of proper grazing areas?