Yeah this is largely the issue. It’s not Extremely common for another person to get injured by their neighbor’s exotic pet. It is, however, the NORM for that exotic pet to be traumatized, poorly socialized, malnourished, fearful, etc., all at the same time.
It’s especially a problem, in my experience, although I don’t have actual surveys and data to back this up, with snakes and other species that don’t emote in a way we can understand.
People who buy a reptile on a whim without doing much Actual research aren’t going to know what a sick, malnourished or distressed animal looks like.
I handled a lot of rescued pythons with permanently stunted growth because they were underfed from the time they hatched. It was extra sad when the owners were good people, with good intentions, and I could tell it broke their hearts to find out they’d been hurting their own pet. But the fact remains that the pet still suffered because of ignorance, regardless of anyone’s intentions.
The average person cannot feasibly afford to provide the diet, enrichment, and veterinary care an animal like a tiger, alligator, or even native mountain lion or wolf requires.
And the fact is in the United States, most of these animals are living in the backyards of the average person, not in accredited zoos.
Every year, we get owls in our rehab center someone found as chicks and decided to “adopt.” But they got big, and loud, and messy, and suddenly they weren’t great pets.
Now these perfectly healthy owls that were IMPORTANT to their ecosystem can never be released again, and they stay in captivity.
Sure, we can offer them good, enriched lives. No, we can’t now replace these multiple, highly important pieces of the food web back into the ecosystem they were stolen from.
It’s just!!! I know I’m largely preaching to the choir here. I’m just so over the US and international pet trade, especially when the US, like on every other topic, loves to tout our laws as if all of the bad, evil pet trading is taking place in other nations and their “black markets,” which is misleading, because the only REASON they take place in “black markets” in other countries is because those countries have even bothered to make laws about it, whereas in the US, we don’t even have any official registry on our large exotics. That’s right, we don’t even know how many pet tigers exist in the United States.
We estimate at least 10,000, roughly three times more than are even left in the wild, and that’s not including those which exist in accredited zoos, but really, we don’t know.
The local authorities sure didn’t know there were 18 in my neighborhood.
So yeah, we don’t have as bad of a black market pet trading problem as other places, but that’s because you don’t NEED a black market if it’s not illegal.
annaxmalina
snowghoul
yousharknotpass
origamiaround
titsay
theartofmadeline
tangentwithtanner
