Pete avoids pets on general principle, because in his entire life, he has never found anything charming or cute, and is especially suspicious of Bella, who is too clever by half, and must therefore be up to something.

He did briefly experiment with keeping scorpions when he was younger, mostly to give him an interesting and cool pet to help him impress the daft kind of goth girls he was chasing at the time, but gave that up when they escaped, and he spent two very nervous days hunting for them in the squat he was living in at the time.