Blue Peter pets
Animals that appeared regularly on the children's show Blue Peter
The Blue Peter pets are animals that regularly appear on the long-running BBC children's television series Blue Peter. For 27 years, when not on TV, these pets were often looked after by Blue Peter's long-standing pet keeper Edith Menezes, who died in 1994. The exceptions were the dogs Petra, Shep and Goldie, who lived with Peter Purves, John Noakes and Simon Groom, respectively, for which the three presenters were paid a stipend for their upkeep.
The first pet was a dog named Petra in 1962, and since then there have been several dogs, cats, tortoises, parrots, and horses. The current animals on the show are Shelley the tortoise and Henry the beagle. Rags, a pony, named by viewers, was purchased with the proceeds of a Christmas appeal in the late 1970s as a Riding for the Disabled horse. The Blue Peter parrot—Joey, and one successor, Barney—featured in the 1960s, but when Barney, a blue-fronted amazon, died, he was not replaced.
In a 1986 documentary shown on BBC2 as part of the Did You See...? series, former presenter Peter Purves recalled that Biddy Baxter, the show's editor, had called him in floods of tears on the day that the first parrot Joey died. He went on to muse in the same interview that had he himself died, Baxter would have been far less upset.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Blue Peter pets” is animals that appeared regularly on the children's show Blue Peter. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Blue, Peter and pets, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4929624. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1994, 1962 and 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “Blue Peter pets” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.