Wildlife, Captivity, and the Pet Trade
Bringing Wildlife Home: While it may be easy and tempting to grab a Garter Snake or Salamander from the backyard instead of buying or adopting a captive bred animal, there are a lot of reasons why you shouldn’t. Removing an animal from the wild often has repercussions for you, the animal itself, native animal populations, the environment, and potentially even your other animals.
The first issue you’ll encounter is that parasites are very common in wild animals. Given their free range, unmonitored diet and unknown travel history, the animal is most likely carrying something that will eventually be a detriment to its health. That’s why captive animals tend to have double or triple the life expectancy of their wild counterparts, because we eliminate natural dangers. Parasites and other potential reptile related diseases can easily move from one animal to another via fecal contact/ingestion, human interaction, and surface contact. Not only could it cost you an expensive vet visit for one animal, it could lead to multiple. Large parasite loads lead to a loss of appetite, regurgitation, swelling, loss of vital organ function, critical weight loss and death. Not only are vet visits expensive, stressful for your animal, and time consuming, they’re also challenging for reptiles because legitimate exotic vets are hard to come by. In our experience, vets who take reptiles aren’t always versed in reptile care. You’ll often leave frustrated, having had more knowledge of your animal than the actual vet and having wasted that time and money. There are experienced, specialty exotic vets out there, they’re just hard to find in most areas.
The next problem you will face is feeding your wild animal. In many cases, wild caught snakes will refuse to eat frozen/thawed rodents and will insist on only eating live prey because that is what comes natural to them. This can be difficult for some new keepers to handle if they refuse to transition to frozen food. Many people may not find an issue with feeding live, but it is something to consider. Insect eating animals can be challenging to feed as well, some may be accustomed to eating a specific type of invertebrate that you can’t get as a captive feeder option from a store. It can be very challenging to keep the animal healthy and stress free when it instinctually sees you as a predator, which it likely will because you took it out of its home. Getting your wild animal eating, parasite free and happy will be hard. They can simply fail to thrive for you, they can still crash, even if you do everything “right.” Health complications aside, taking animals from the wild is illegal in many places as well. If you aren’t familiar with your local laws and conservation acts, we would recommend not attempting it at all. Keeping wild or even captive born native animals can lead to substantial fines and other consequences. Even beyond that, there are far more reasons this is a bad idea. Removing native animals from the wild can impact breeding populations (especially if it’s an adult animal), and contributes to endangering the species’ existence as a whole. That’s a lot to be responsible for. Human intervention in animal populations can affect more than that one species but all species, predator and prey, who rely on each other to balance numbers and contribute to a stable, functioning, biodiverse world.
Keeping animals for a short period of time before releasing them back into the wild is another issue. If the animal you’re harbouring comes into contact with other animals in your home, they can contract new “captive diseases” and bacteria strains that you might not be aware of. If new diseases make it into native populations, this can be a major problem. Immune systems of animal populations change based on their environment and socialization, just like humans. Wild populations might not have the antibodies to fight certain captive animal diseases and vice versa. A rampant, foreign disease could be disastrous for native animal colonies. Wild Caught Animals (Pet Trade): Understanding the consequences, this information can be transferred to a specific area of the legal pet trade as well believe it or not. It is expensive and specialized to breed reptiles. Therefore, captive bred reptiles are usually expensive to purchase (with the exception of easy to breed, common, hobby reptiles like Corn Snakes and Crested Geckos). Chances are, if the price of an animal seems too good to be true, it probably is. Exotic animal “farming” is a massive, worldwide industry. Farming means that animals are collected from outdoor pens or otherwise ‘cages’ once a year, after a male-female pair is placed there to reproduce. The “farmers” may supplement food in years where food is sparse, but the animals are almost completely unmanned, and left to be “wild.” This is commonplace in areas like Florida (for its favourable climate), usually with species like Chameleons and Green Iguanas. After the babies are collected, they are wholesaled into the pet trade.
Similarly, other more exotic species of animals are also collected in their native ranges for sale into the pet trade. They are usually captured by locals, and sold and shipped to dealers in the North American market. After that, they are commonly sold to Wholesalers who then sell to major Pet Retailers to be sold one last time. A long journey for the animals, as they are put into crates or bins where they are over-crowded and stressed out. They often become dehydrated and emaciated in the process and have ample opportunity to contract parasites and disease on their travels. They aren’t separated by gender or age, so they usually breed and fight under the stress of the experience. They frequently end up in the pet store gravid, dehydrated, injured and full of problems. Some wild caught reptiles can adapt to their new living situation better than others, usually if they are very caught young. This doesn’t apply to all of them, but for the most part a young animal can adjust better after receiving proper husbandry, medical care if necessary and a great deal of effort on the part of the keeper. Adult animals that are brought into captivity are significantly more challenging to readjust. Understandably so, as they have been removed from their environment, put through a traumatic experience and placed into new living quarters that are completely different from what they’re accustomed to.
While decades of reptile keeping experience have given us the knowledge to give an animal basically anything its species requires, it’s still going to be different to what a wild animal really experiences in its natural range. It may technically have all its needs met and more, but it’s a different world altogether and they are very likely to crash from the stress and change. This is very common for animals like Water Dragons, Anoles, Tokay Geckos, Uromastyx, Mountain Horned Dragons, Legless Lizards and exotic species of snakes like African Egg Eating Snakes. Always buy captive bred animals whenever possible and try your best to buy from responsible breeders and reptile expos over chain pet stores. Whenever buying any animal, always get as much information as you can about the animal’s behavioural, genetic and feeding history.
Releasing Pets into the Wild: Now that we understand the problems associated with bringing wildlife into captivity, we should also look at what happens when captive bred animals are released into the wild. When you take on the responsibility of a pet, you should be completely prepared for exactly what it is you’re getting into. This responsibility includes;
- Knowing, accepting, and being able to fulfil its care requirements at every age. - Being prepared to care for the animal for its entire life, however long that may be. Most reptiles have exceptionally long lives in captivity. - Having a safe space for your animal to go in the case of a housing emergency. - Having money set aside for emergency vet trips. - Understanding that animals need time, and planning for personal future lifestyle changes to make sure you will always have time to take care of it, to the best of your ability. - Being able to afford any other unexpected expenses regarding the animal. (Equipment repairs, replacements) - Being absolutely sure this is the animal for you, to ensure you will not get tired of it a year later. - If a situation arises that is completely beyond your control and you can absolutely no longer care for your animal, despite all of your planning, make sure to re-home your animal to a responsible home or to a rescue. Never release your animal into the wild under any circumstances. When irresponsible reptile owners release their animals into the wild, depending on the climate of the area, the animal will suffer a painful, undeserved death OR it can devastate native populations. If a non-native animal is released and can withstand the climate of the area enough to breed there, it can become an invasive species. In this situation, so long as the native animals pose no competition or threat to the newly introduced species’ survival, it WILL become an invasive population. In some cases, these animals are predators who cause serious damage to the way an environment functions. We’ve all heard of the seemingly never-ending problems faced by the Florida Everglades. A hurricane destroys a breeding facility and releases a number of Burmese Pythons. Those pythons, though not native to the area, thrive in the ideal climate. They are opportunistic predators with a keen skill for camouflage and no predators in the area large enough to prey on them. They are hard to find, and have the opportunity to breed at uncontrollable rates without intervention. With the sudden explosion in predatory animals, Florida’s native fauna populations are steadily declining. Burmese Pythons aren’t the only invasive species in Florida either. The climate is virtually perfect for many non-native animals to thrive. This includes several species of fish and plenty of Iguanas, which have been released from irresponsible pet owners who no longer wished to care for them. Many of these invasive animals are out-competing native species for food, making native species into food, decimating natural flora, and infiltrating human occupied areas.
Our actions as pet owners have the ability to influence animal populations and ecosystems everywhere. Taking animals from and/or releasing animals into the wild can have major consequences for everyone. We need to remember this the next time we let our house-cat (an unmonitored predator) outside to run around as it pleases, killing rodents, reptiles/amphibians and birds at unprecedented rates. We also need to remember this when we let our children bring home the frog from the pond down the street, as it could very well be an endangered or protected species. The decisions we make regarding our animals have an impact on native wildlife populations. It is our responsibility to protect what needs protecting.
