ANIMAL ABUSE

ANIMAL ABUSE

Exotic pets are often marketed in local pet shops and appear to be cute and eccentric pets. Shop owners often avoid explaining the the downsides to owning these animals to customers, and the animals are instead sold as being docile and sweet creatures from exotic locales around the world. In addition to the lack of information surrounding the proper care and treatment of these animals, the shop owners selling them will rarely give honest accounts of how the animal was captured and transported. This is partially because many shop keepers are as unaware as the customers on how exotic animals are captured and brought to the United States.

Typically, exotic animals are captured in their homeland, transported to the market in which they are to be sold, and then distributed to various pet shop owners for resale to the public. This presents several problems, both for the final customer as well as for the animal itself.

When these exotic animals are captured, the hunters often use unethical capturing methods. For example, a common method for catching baby chimps is to kill the mother and then take the babies. Another example is how hunters will sometimes use cyanide, a dangerous chemical, to catch fish. These shaky methods can have disastrous results on the fragile ecosystems from which these animals are coming. Furthermore, being captured and having to deal with the multiple transfers into different environments provokes high, unhealthy stress levels for the animals.

Once in America, life only becomes more stressful for these animals. The United States is not their natural habitat, which makes it difficult for many them to thrive. Especially in a house. Often, people visit a pet store and make a rash decision to purchase an animal they found because it looks cute. What they don’t know is that in a year, that adorable, fluffy African cat won't be so little and will be a terror; destroying their home, property and eating it's owner into bankruptcy and possibly turning them into a meal themselves. What’s the family to do then? It’s not surprising that many people attempt to turn these animals loose in the wild. However introducing a non-native animal into a new ecosystem can have drastic results on the fragile life cycle of the immediate area. Worse yet, the results and consequences are not easily reversed.

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