Wild Pets and a Pet Peeve

I work primarily in conservation but also own a retail establishment selling mostly reptiles, invetebrates, amphibians and chelonia, but also exotic mammals and birds, have worked with private collections and as pets things ranging from hedgehogs to foxes, raccoons and skunks, meerkats (very popular in the UK right now and quite unsuitable as pets), small species of monkeys and probably dozens of species of various exotic rodent (a steppe lemming is giving me the evil eye right now as I type this...)

But when it comes to any exotic animal as a pet what I can tell you is that unfortunately, a lot of people don't do their research. A lot of people keep animals that need very specialist requirements (google a statistic on how many tigers are kept as pets in the USA...), and think that because an animal is alive, and may even be able to breed in that situation, that they're meeting the requirements. They're not. I do a lot of rescue work with exotics and some of the states you see peoples pets in are quite horrific.

I don't actually advocate the keeping of a great deal of species of exotics in captivity even though exotics in the pet trade is my main source of income. There are hundreds of species that are perfectly suitable for the pet trade, but far more that are not and people are always pushing the boundaries and want something different, especially if it's cute, without research or thinking of the consequences. And unfortunately, there are plenty of dealers out there willing to sell with no questions asked.

Example, due to a TV advert "compare the meerkat", we had a massive boom in people wanting meerkats as pets over the last 5 years in the UK. Unscrupulous dealers sell them at ?500 a pop to silly people who think they're cute and will make good house pets. What you get is a pyschologically disturbed animal that is inherently designed to live in a group and will slowly but surely go insane without a social environment. In an effort to keep themselves from this, they will bond with humans, and make humans their pack - leading to massive seperation anxiety, horrific distress and problems when the human goes to work... and even more so when the human decides they don't want that pet anymore, to the point where it can takes a rescue organisation years of hard work to manage to integrate a meerkat back into a pack of it's own kind. Monkeys are another big problem where the pyschological impact of being kept solitary is massive. A lot of highly structured pack animals simply do not do well being kept alone in captivity and humans cannot really understand nor provide adequate social interaction for that sort of species.

On the other hand, if you want an exotic like an african pygmy hedgehog (of which I personally have 10 adults), then they are perfectly suited to captivity in much the same was as keeping a guinea pig. We can provide for their nutrition, we can provide exercise (especially since they'll use a wheel), they show no fear when brought up with humans, they're easily bred in captivity and this has no impact on any wild area, population or species, and are solitary animals that require no social interaction with their own species.

So yeah, every day I deal with exotics and I see both sides of the argument there. Some animals have far more complicated requirements than a personal home can provide. Some have even more complex requirements than even most zoo's can provide and researching the natural behaviour of any exotic is really crucial, and then saying to yourself, well can I replicate the diet, habitat, exercise and social needs of this animal.

But a lot of people will say keeping any "wild" animal is cruel (and I say wild as in, not domesticated, not as in, taken from the wild, because that's a whole other debate), and I've met a lot of narrow minded people when working with exotics. This trade has big ups and big downs.

Source: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1177437-Wild-Pets-and-a-Pet-Peeve

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