WASHINGTON POST (DC) 30 July 03 Born to Be Wild - Exotic Pets Are Big Business. And Sometimes Bad News. (Don Oldenburg)
Bristol, Virginia. Brittaney Staples hands $5 across a table stacked with dozens of lidded clear-plastic containers crawling with baby milk snakes, boa constrictors, pythons and lizards. She looks inside a wriggly sackcloth bag at the five-inch baby iguana she just bought. It's not her first and probably not her last. She's had five or six.
"They usually just died because I didn't know how to take care of them when I was little," says the teen. Those that didn't die grew to three feet long before she gave them away. A four-foot albino corn snake, two bearded dragon lizards and two cats await their new menagerie mate at her home in Rehoboth Beach, Del. "To keep them happy, it costs a lot," she says.
Nearby, dealer Wade Harrell catches escaping Madagascar hissing cockroaches and gently returns them to a three-gallon jar overrun with hundreds of the three-inch-long insects. Scurrying up his bare forearm is a cigar-size giant African millipede that might empty a room elsewhere but here draws onlookers.
"Most people come by and say, 'Gross,' " says Harrell, who supplements his day job at a Richmond nature center by breeding pet bugs. "You get other people who've been in the hobby a while who say, 'Wow! Hissing cockroaches! A dozen for $10!' "
It's no understatement to say it's a jungle in here. The first annual Exp03 exotic pet show and sale, held over two days last month at the Holiday Inn conference center in this southwest Virginia town, drew 2,200 alternative-pet hobbyists and awestruck gawkers from a 500-mile radius: ponytailed men with tattoos and T-shirts imprinted with cobras, their tank-topped girlfriends looking bored; "Crocodile Hunter" wannabes; middle-aged parents with wide-eyed youngsters mesmerized by more icky creatures than they've ever seen outside a zoo.
Not your grandfather's pet show, this one features tabletops crammed with thousands of coldblooded snakes, lizards, turtles and frogs, thousands more of tarantulas, scorpions and weird insects. Outnumbered are small rodents and tropical birds. Unlike most of these shows, this one has a "hot" room for venomous snakes, some of the world's deadliest -- cobras, mambas, rattlesnakes. And they're for sale.
"These things attract a lot of people," says Mike Wade, the venomous-snake collector from Greeneville, Tenn., who organized Exp03. He estimates the show's 45 dealers brought $1 million in animals.
During the last two weeks of July alone, dozens of shows like this are being held throughout the country. Dozens more are scheduled. A billion-dollar industry by some estimates, the exotic pet business is booming like never before.
Even though: Up to 90 percent of exotic animals brought in are dead inside two years of captivity, according to the Humane Society of the United States. And before they die, some will injure humans, and some will spread disease.
'Snakes Don't Care'
There's trouble in the exotic pet kingdom. Recent events have exposed an unpleasant underbelly:
In May, Gambian giant pouched rats, imported from Africa and kept as trendy "pocket pets," transmitted monkeypox to even trendier pet prairie dogs in the Midwest, and they passed the disease to humans. With 72 reports of possible human infection, 37 cases confirmed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls monkeypox "an emerging infectious disease in North America."
In early June, Montgomery County authorities raided the Silver Spring warehouse of Reptile Connections, an exotic pet import business. They found 1,500 animals -- baby ball pythons, venomous Gaboon vipers and king cobras, scorpions and baby alligators. Most were without enough food, water or space; several hundred were dead. The owner, Christopher Coroneos, faces 31 felony counts of cruelty to animals -- one count for each species harmed.
In late June, state and federal wildlife officials seized 706 rare and endangered snakes, turtles and amphibians in raids in Ohio, Indiana and Michigan.
Aimed at breaking up one of the nation's largest suspected networks of illegal reptile sales, the bust was the culmination of a two-year investigation that cuffed 53 dealers. State officials alone brought 369 charges, and the investigation since has snowballed to seven other states. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says the illegal trade in wildlife is second only to illegal drugs in the United States.
"You think this is a marginal activity and there isn't much of it going on -- and then you start delving into it and find it is an enormous industry," says Wayne Pacelle, senior vice president at the D.C.-based Humane Society.
Tallying the precise number of exotic pets kept in this country is nearly impossible. Except for the token snakes, reptiles and birds that mainstream pet stores carry, the industry operates largely under the radar of the general public, peddling creatures online, at shows and through dealers and breeders selling from their homes.
But the Humane Society estimates that 7.3 million reptiles are kept as pets and 2 million are imported every year. And there are 10,000 "big cats" -- lions, tigers, jaguars and cougars -- the society says.
"Why? Something different than a dog or a cat," says Chris Lowry, 23, an assistant manager at a car repair shop in Waynesboro, Va., who has just purchased two leopard geckos for $20 each and a baby python for $90. He's considering a three-foot marble blood python, but it's $1,250. At home he has four ball pythons, two Borneo short-tail pythons, four leopard geckos and two bearded dragons. "My friends think I'm crazy," he says.
Wade, who keeps his venomous snake collection at a Bristol, Va., pet store because his home state prohibits keeping them, says owning nature's most unusual creatures goes deeper -- to bragging rights.
"Most people who have these huge pythons have them to impress their friends -- come see my huge python!" says Wade. "It's not a companion thing. Snakes don't care. A snake is not a real pet."
Exotics dealers call it the "potato-chip syndrome" -- bet you can't buy just one.
Cute and Deadly
In the Bristol show's refreshments room, customers take a break and lunch on hot dogs and hamburgers.
Do they wash their hands after touching snakes and lizards all morning? Wade glances sideways and shakes his head no. "You can get diseases from these animals," he says, "but most of them forget or don't bother."
While the CDC scours 15 states for monkeypox-infected animals, other species bring their own parasites and zoonotic diseases.
Ninety percent of all reptiles -- including iguanas, lizards and turtles -- carry salmonella and shed it in their feces. More than 93,000 cases a year of human salmonella poisoning in the United States come from reptiles, according to the CDC.
Monkeys are known to transmit Ebola and herpes B virus, which can be deadly to humans. The respiratory epidemic SARS is thought to have come from civet cats in China. Two years ago, the population of wild prairie dogs in Montana was decimated by bubonic plague, and authorities had to warn humans to stay clear. Last summer, prairie dogs in South Dakota got tularemia, another dangerous infection.
Melissa Kaplan, an environmental educator in Northern California and co-author of "Iguanas for Dummies," says outbreaks like monkeypox tend to be too limited to spur broad action on the exotics trade. Imports of all East African rodents have been banned, as were sales of pet turtles under four inches in the late '70s after it was determined that 14 percent of the 2 million salmonella cases each year were due to the cute creatures. "That's 280,000 people, mostly children, sick every year," she says. But, "unfortunately, I think the monkeypox scare is just going to be a brief blip on the screen."
Asks the Humane Society's Pacelle: "Why would we expose people to some new scourge or danger just so people might have some new novelty pet?"
No one keeps figures on the number of people injured or killed by exotic pets. A Humane Society analysis from 1998 to 2001 found that seven people died and 27 were injured by privately owned tigers. The University of Florida says 7,000 venomous-snake bites and 15 resulting fatalities are reported in the United States annually, though it doesn't distinguish wild snake bites from pet bites.
In March, a Severna Park man's pet water moccasin bit his girlfriend as she reached for cigarettes from her purse. She lost part of her thumb to poison; the man was sentenced earlier this month to 90 days for reckless endangerment.
Outside the show's venomous snake room, Jim Harrison says he expects some people aren't going to like the message at his featured afternoon talk.
"I don't think private individuals should have venomous snakes unless they have the anti-serum and extensive training -- and most of these people don't," says Harrison, director of the Kentucky Reptile Zoo near Lexington, a nonprofit institution that conducts medical research and has the largest anti-serum collection in the United States. "It appears to me that there are people buying this stuff without a clue what they're getting into."
Death by Fad
Clinging to Bonnie Keller's shoulder is an eight-inch Australian blue-tongue skink. At her feet in a six-foot tub curls a colossal albino Burmese python, 12 feet long and 100 pounds. Near a stack of leaflets promoting reptile adoptions and educational shows are a seven-inch leopard gecko and a four-foot ball python. None of these animals is for sale.
This is a sampling of rescued animals from the Virginia Reptile Rescue, which Keller and her husband operate in Richmond.
Keller laments that so many living creatures are doomed because of fads, sold to inappropriate customers who end up seeing their pets as disposable.
The poster pet of this predicament is the green iguana, like the one Brittaney Staples bought for $5. Keller estimates that of the 2 million iguanas imported every year, 50 percent are dead in the first six months and 50 percent of the survivors die in the next six months. "Probably less than 1 percent live long lives," she says. "That's a sickening number."
Those animals that do survive often get dumped. Baby iguanas can grow to five or six feet long and 15 to 20 pounds. They become so unmanageable that owners abandon them to die exposed to the wrong climate or from starvation, or turn them over to rescue centers or to veterinarians who euthanize them. A survey of 32 U.S. iguana rescuers a couple of years ago found that 10,000 green iguanas had been abandoned at rehab doorsteps that year.
At Virginia Reptile Rescue, people who want to adopt an animal must fill out a four-page application and meet the Kellers' strict requirements on know-how and commitment. They sign a contract stipulating that the animal is never to be traded, sold or transferred. "It comes back to me if they can't keep it," Keller says.
Earlier at the show, she watched the sale of a baby Silcotta tortoise the size of a golf ball. The seller provided no information about the animal. "That's wrong," Keller says, explaining that the tortoise will mature to 36 inches long and 150 to 200 pounds. "I'm going to end up with that tortoise, or another rescue is going to end up with it, or the tortoise is going to end up dead very quickly. Unfortunately, that's what happens most of the time."
Living Inventory
North Carolina dealer Jonathan McMillan brought 300 of his 1,000-reptile inventory to Exp03. Mention the Silver Spring warehouse raid and he says losing 10 to 15 percent of a shipment is just part of the business. "You can lose up to 50 or 60 ball pythons a day," says McMillan. "It's going to happen. Nothing you can do about it."
Bruce Weissgold of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's Enforcement Division in Arlington says: "A large percentage of imported exotics die in transport or soon after . . . because imported animals come distressed, diseased and frequently injured."
Unfortunately, if a dealer buys an animal cheap -- say, $25 -- "why would he put more money into veterinary care if it is doing poorly when he can just buy another animal for $25?" says Tim Hoen, a medical researcher at Johns Hopkins University and founder of the Mid-Atlantic Reptile Show, scheduled for September in Timonium, one of the strictest shows in country.
Hoen says he allows only dealers who promote the best industry practices. He allows only captive-bred animals, no wild-caught or imported. He donates proceeds to conservation.
"When reptile people make a lot of money, sometimes they forget these animals feel pain if not cared for properly," says Hoen. "We can't forget we aren't dealing in furniture."
Looking for Solutions
At his 20-foot-wide table, Larry Kenton is the only dealer at the show selling more books -- 350 snake and reptile titles -- than animals. The longtime rock band agent brought only a few dozen snakes, babies born and bred at his Maryland Reptile Farm in Reisterstown. "I always say before you buy the animal, learn about it," says Kenton.
He thinks he has the solution to many of the exotic problems: "John Q. Public at shows and pet stores, he should be sold all captive-bred." They pose no wild-to-domestic humane issues, they don't carry as much disease, they don't deplete animal populations in the wild and they are more easily maintained pets, he says.
At the next booth is Jon Garvey, a Mercedes master mechanic at Euro Motorcars in Bethesda who moonlights as a reptile breeder at his Germantown store, Dragon Masters. All of his animals are captive-bred. And he promotes products that exemplify what could save the industry from self-destruction: high-quality, health-conscious exotic animal foods made by Ectotherm, a three-year-old company founded by biologists at Indiana State University. There are calcium bricks for shelled animals and protein-based nuggets for carnivorous reptiles.
"One of my pet peeves is if you are going to spend good money on an animal and your intentions are good ones, then house and feed the animals correctly," Garvey says. "We have to set a standard that is higher than any dog or cat owner has to set because people have such a frowned-upon attitude toward reptiles."
Laws regulating animal cruelty and sales of exotic pets are a chaotic patchwork. For instance, Virginia allows venomous snakes; Maryland and the District ban them.
"Some laws are stronger than others, some cover different animals, some cover only dangerous animals," says Heidi Prescott, national director of the Fund for Animals, headquartered in Silver Spring. "And then you have cases springing up like when monkeypox aroused the public and you get federal restrictions."
But the monkeypox scare has encouraged some of those who would outlaw exotic animals altogether. Pacelle hopes for passage of the Captive Wildlife Safety Act, now before Congress, that would ban interstate transportation of big cats for the pet trade.
"We certainly would like to see a total ban of exotic pets nationwide," says Prescott, who counts as victories local laws like the one Palmer Township in Pennsylvania passed early in July prohibiting the keeping, breeding and selling of exotic animals.
Kaplan says: "I'd like to see a total ban, but I know that is unlikely. It isn't easy to fight a billion-dollar industry. As long as there are people to buy, exotic animal dealers will cheerfully sell, no matter what the impact is on wild populations or on the animals -- or humans."
The biggest display of venomous snakes at the show is Roark Ferguson's. Owner of Roark's Reptile Safari in Charleston, S.C., he has $65 Gaboon vipers from East Africa and $140 hairy bush vipers, $125 South American rattlesnakes and a lively $275 Mexican blacktail. Then there's the stunning banded Egyptian cobras, $750 a pair. He has spiders, too.
After his demonstration, Ferguson places hand-size tarantulas on lingerers' heads as cameras flash. He persuades a nervously giggling woman to kiss the tarantula. He drapes a five-foot python on a young girl.
Then Candace Redden of Beckley, W.Va., confronts him. She's "a snake lover," she says, but as the mother of three children she's concerned that "anyone off the street can buy a venomous snake."
A suddenly serious Ferguson yells: "Actually anyone can buy one. In this country we have rights!"
Later, in the refreshment room, he's still steamed. The fact is, he says, "dogs kill more people in this country every year than all exotics combined. And we're not going to get rid of the dogs. Here we have this little monkeypox scare, but how many people have been affected? More people will choke on hot dogs next year than exotic animal viruses will affect, but you don't see them trying to shut down Oscar Mayer. We got cigarettes that kill 300,000 people a year in this country and they're not shutting them down."
Problems in the exotic animal industry? "The animals are never the problem," he rants, "it's the people. There's a people problem in this country."
Born to Be Wild - Exotic Pets Are Big Business. And Sometimes Bad News.

[ Show Entire Thread ]