Comment: My thanks to Mr S. Schindler for giving the lead to this important series of press discussions.
JOURNAL SENTINEL (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) 19 July 03 Exotic pets under scrutiny - Monkeypox outbreak reveals hazards of animal trade (Lee Bergquist and Rick Romell)
Don Schley knows his way around exotic animals.
He was there for the hedgehog boom and the ostrich bubble. He made a small fortune in pot-bellied pigs.
On a farm west of Eau Claire, he and wife Nola keep kinkajous, chinchillas and fennec foxes. They once set aside a bedroom in their house for an 825-pound pig named Spot.
"He was a honey," Don Schley said.
They have cavies - South American rodents that make noises like a Nintendo game. They have four binturongs - animals from Asia that have big claws and a tail adapted for grasping and smell like Fritos.
All told, the Schleys own hundreds of exotics, and while they now keep the animals mostly because Nola Schley likes them, the couple in the past have "made money on pretty much all of them," Don Schley said.
But the 54-year-old, plain-spoken Schley is no apologist for the trade.
"People are in it for the money and not for the love of the animals," he said, "and that's what I say is wrong with the exotic animal business."
Others in the industry dispute that, but it is widely agreed that the business is getting increased scrutiny.
Most recently, it's come with the outbreak of monkeypox, a rare African virus never seen in the Western Hemisphere until it was identified in Wisconsin last month. Monkeypox, which has sickened 72 people in six states, is thought to have ridden in on rodents imported for the exotic pet trade, then jumped to humans via pet prairie dogs.
It's only the latest example of animal diseases making people sick. In an increasingly global economy, illnesses such as West Nile virus, severe acute respiratory syndrome and now monkeypox leap borders and species lines, posing challenges for policy-makers responsible for protecting humans against exotic ailments.
"We never thought about monkeypox - it never entered our brains," said Sarah Shapiro Hurley, a veterinarian with the state Department of Natural Resources, who for years has pushed for legislation to better track the movement of captive wildlife. "But the thought that something like this might happen was what we were thinking about."
Dispersed business
The movement of animals that regulators such as Shapiro Hurley want to track is part of a far-flung, widely dispersed business that ranges from people breeding snakes in suburban basements to exhibitors showing tigers that have never seen an Asian jungle to large importers who bring in hundreds of thousands of creatures annually.
It's not Microsoft, but it's not the corner grocery, either.
Each year, the United States receives 1.5 million to 2.5 million live reptiles, 170,000 to 320,000 live birds and more than 200 million tropical fish from abroad, according to TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring program of the World Wildlife Fund.
The animals come in through 32 ports of entry, where a corps of 92 U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service inspectors keeps watch for smuggling.
Protected snakes have been found inside passengers' socks or nylons, and smugglers mix illegal animals with otherwise legal shipments, said Nicholas Chavez, assistant special agent in charge of Fish & Wildlife's Midwest office.
"You are sort of looking for a needle in a haystack," said Sheila Einsweiler, a wildlife inspector at the agency.
The inspectors' job also has gotten more complex. Since 1992, according to Fish & Wildlife, the number of species shipped into the U.S. has risen by more than 75% - from about 200,000 to 352,000.
Pets are harvested from the American wild, too. Prairie dogs are vacuumed from their holes in Western prairies. In Texas alone for the year ending Aug. 31, 2001, collectors caught 15,161 prairie dogs and more than 19,000 reptiles.
Breeding in captivity within the U.S. produces still more animals - primates and pygmy goats, geckos and bearded dragons, kangaroos and kinkajous, elephants and giraffes - all to feed an appetite for out-of-the-ordinary pets.
"People buy on impulse because it's kind of nifty to have the 'in' thing," said Yvonne Bellay, humane officer and a veterinarian with the state agriculture department. "In the end, the animal pays."
Critics say exotic animals foster diseases, pose dangers to humans - such as the Beloit boy who awoke to find his father's pet python clamped to his arm - and are victims forced to live in unnatural circumstances.
Government officials worry about a patchwork of regulation that crosses local, state and federal boundaries. The rules in Wisconsin, at least, could soon tighten. A law passed in January could ban ownership of some exotics and require licenses and health certificates to help keep tabs on animal traffic.
Exotics with special needs
One problem, critics say, is that owners are often ill-prepared to care for such animals.
Two Rivers veterinarian Christopher Katz said many exotics have special needs: Reptiles require a specific spectrum of ultraviolet light; the wrong food can cause seizures in iguanas and heart problems in ferrets. And Katz said confining animals to cramped quarters can cause cage psychosis.
"They pace, or bob their heads, and because there isn't enough enrichment in their lives, they literally get bored out of their minds," he said.
Last year, Milwaukee Area Domestic Animal Control Commission officers removed 460 exotic pets from Milwaukee County homes. A third were euthanized.
Many of the animals are common pets such as gerbils and hamsters, but there are dangerous creatures, too. Executive Director Len Selkurt said the agency removes an average of 13 alligators a year. It has rescued cougars, leopards, caracals, rattlesnakes, cobras and pit vipers.
In Lake Forest, Ill., the city's Wildlife Discovery Center annually takes in a half-dozen reticulated pythons - the longest snake on earth - and some 25 boa constrictors. Many come from Wisconsin.
Program manager Rob Carmichael said the center has "definitely noticed an increase in the number of abandoned exotic animals" over the last five years.
The Milwaukee County Zoo gets calls every week from people who are ill-equipped to care for their pets, Deputy Director Bruce Beehler said.
"You can't broad-brush this," Beehler said, "but I would say that exotics don't make good pets. Typically, though not always, they receive less than adequate care."
Jill Carnegie sees that regularly. Her Valley of the Kings sanctuary in southern Walworth County has provided a home to more than 200 unwanted animals, including about 50 big cats.
Among them: a cougar from Missouri that had been kept in a 31/2-by-5-foot cage and fed mice and bugs; a lion from Chicago that had been given cocaine and LSD; a $3,000 caracal that lost its home after it tore up the furniture.
"And sadly, a lot of these animals end up in Dumpsters," Carnegie said. "They don't find refuge."
Sometimes, there's good reason for getting rid of an exotic pet, as James Yaklich learned two years ago, when his 10-foot-long albino python slithered from its glass cage and into the bed of Yaklich's 5-year-old son.
The boy was asleep, but something startled the snake. It struck the child's hand.
And it wouldn't let go. When Yaklich got to the bedroom, according to the police report, he found the animal "clamped on" and coiled around the boy's arm.
The child's injuries weren't serious. He was treated at a hospital for cuts and bruises. But before he could be taken there, his father had to free him from the python's grip, and though Yaklich is a big man - he's 6-foot-3 and 265 pounds - it wasn't easy.
"I wrestled with the snake for a half-hour, 45 minutes before I got him off," he said.
Conventional pets hurt people, too. In fact, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that dogs bite more than 4.7 million people a year. As many as 800,000 require medical care, and about a dozen die.
Compared with exotic animals, bites from dogs and cats are more common because more people own them, said Wisconsin's state epidemiologist, Jeffrey Davis. The big difference, he said, is the kind of germs and toxins exotic animals can transmit, including unusual poisons and germs for which there is no treatment.
Following the fads
Exotics are traded by the ark-load through dealers, on the Internet and in auctions.
In Macon, Mo., Jim Lolli and his brothers stage what they believe are the largest wild animal auctions in the country - four a year, each with up to $1.5 million and as many as 2,000 animals changing hands.
Most are hoof stock - antelope, llamas, deer, elk, gazelles and such. About 20% are caged animals. Every winter Lolli Brothers holds a special yak sale. Camels are particularly popular these days - zebras, too. A white or pinto camel can bring up to $20,000, Lolli said, and a female zebra as much as $10,000.
"Those are kind of our gravy animals," he said.
But it's a business of fads, booms and busts, as Schley knows firsthand.
The genial trader - "I buy and sell anything from a typewriter to a truck if I think I can make a buck on it" - has seen prices soar, then plunge, on pot-bellied pigs, African hedgehogs and ostriches.
He hit it big with the pigs - natives of Asia that became a fad pet around 1990. On an investment of less than $25,000, Schley said, he racked up sales of $250,000 in one year.
His first litter of nine piglets brought $30,000, and "it went nuts after that," he said. At one point, Schley said, he paid $10,000 for one pig. Others, he said, paid as much as $30,000 for a single animal.
But as rapidly as prices shot up, they fell. Today, Lolli said, the seller of a pot-bellied pig is lucky to get $40.
The reasons: Interest faded, breeders overproduced in their quest for big profits, and some once-cute piglets turned into 150-pound problems.
All of which helps explain why the dollar volume at the Lolli Brothers' exotic animal auctions is probably down 40% to 50% from a decade ago.
Kevin Hanley is familiar with such market fluctuations.
Two years ago, he and his wife, Sue, produced 1,200 geckos in their New Berlin basement. This year, it will be about 100. With gecko prices dropping amid a flooded market - some Florida breeders have been kicking out as many as 25,000 a year, Hanley said - the couple have shifted toward non-venomous snakes.
Hanley is a pleasant, 41-year-old Air Force retiree who happens to enjoy reptiles and has found a way to turn his interest into a part-time business. He likes being able to stay home - greeting a visitor in drawstring shorts and a T-shirt from a reptile fanciers' Web site - and counts himself lucky to have a wife who shares his enthusiasm.
Their snakes and geckos live in Rubbermaid plastic bins stored on shelves lining the basement. On one wall are a few bumper stickers: "I Ň Leopard Geckos," "Give a Snake a Brake."
A freezer is stocked with bags of dead mice - food for the snakes. A storeroom houses the live rodents. Hanley grows a couple of hundred rats and mice a week, some of which he sells to other breeders. He doesn't have enough space to raise crickets for the geckos, so he has the insects shipped in from Georgia.
"The reptile food market is a booming business," Hanley said. "It's amazing."
Small operators
Booming, however, is a relative term. Even including such figures as the Lolli brothers, the exotic animal business is composed largely of small operators.
James Hirschboeck is a new addition to the ranks. The Walworth County businessman began dealing in exotics just recently - only months after state authorities exterminated his 118 white-tailed deer because chronic wasting disease had been found in the herd. Prohibited from owning deer for five years, Hirschboeck said his move into camels, zebras and wildebeests was a way to fill his empty pens and stay in the animal business.
Another small participant, Scott Knapp, owner of SK Exotics, a pet distributorship based in Knapp's South Milwaukee home, found himself in the middle of the monkeypox outbreak. Knapp sold prairie dogs he had purchased from an Illinois dealer who had housed them with African rodents that were believed to have passed on the disease.
Knapp, who himself became infected with monkeypox, sold prairie dogs to two Milwaukee-area pet stores and at a swap meet in Wausau.
"One day he appeared with some animals," recalled Mike Hoffer, owner of Hoffer's Tropic Life Pets in Milwaukee, one of the stores that bought prairie dogs. Knapp offered prairie dogs for $50 each - instead of the $65 Hoffer had been paying.
Hoffer, in turn, said he would price the prairie dogs at $159. A three-time markup is not uncommon on live stock because so many die before they are sold, Hoffer said.
While monkeypox has given opponents of exotic animal ownership new ammunition, longtime industry observer Pat Hoctor believes some of the most frequently heard criticisms are wrong.
Animals, for example, typically do not suffer in captivity, said Hoctor, editor of the Animal Finders' Guide, a trade magazine and advertising vehicle. On the contrary, he said, captive animals receive care that lengthens their lives and enhances reproduction.
"It's tough out there in the wild," he said. "You get a broken leg, you're dead."
Animals caught in the wild typically calm down after initial stress, and many exotics are bred in captivity anyway, Hoctor said.
"They don't have a clue what the wild is," he said.
While some animals can become aggressive, such behavior usually stems from the way the animal is being treated, Hoctor said.
"There are people who shouldn't raise exotics," he said, "but there are a lot of people who shouldn't raise kids."
http://www.jsonline.com/news/State/jul03/156367.asp
JOURNAL SENTINEL (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) 20 July 03 Tighter rules on exotic pets sought - Trade has increased risks animals pose (Marilynn Marchione)
It was supposed to be a lesson on how tame poisonous snakes are.
Virginia Day was holding one of the 160 serpents at the "zoo" she ran from her house trailer in Manitowoc County. Snakes are fine if you know how to handle them, she told a visitor and his son. In fact, she had hand-fed 18 baby chicks to this 7-foot Indian cobra the day before.
"I knew he wouldn't get angry and bite me," Day recalled, "but I never thought he'd think I was food."
As the horrified pair watched, the snake attacked her, and a lesson in safety on that day 10 years ago changed dramatically.
A Flight for Life helicopter whisked Day to a Milwaukee hospital as zoos throughout the Midwest pooled their supplies of rare cobra anti-venin. Thirty-two vials were rushed to the city to save her life.
Day spent three weeks in the hospital, and because she was on public aid, taxpayers paid for her care just as they had after she was bitten by a South African puff adder a year earlier.
Exotic pets have injured and sometimes killed their owners or other people. But the recent monkeypox outbreak, which sickened 72 people in six states, underscores a higher price we all pay: a threat to public health from emerging infectious diseases.
The exotic pet industry is an ideal system for breeding novel germs, which puts the public at risk in ways that people who buy, sell and handle such animals can't possibly know, health experts say. They are calling for tighter regulation.
Industry experts acknowledge that exotics can spread disease, but they argue that the chance of catching an illness from them is small.
Magnified dangers
The dangers posed by exotic animals have been magnified by the Internet and increased international trade, which have made it easier for people to acquire more wild animals and more diverse species from remote lands.
"We now have this potential to make it literally one global infectious disease world," said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
The monkeypox outbreak illustrates how a germ can be unleashed on an entire continent, putting people who never had contact with an exotic animal at risk of getting a potentially disfiguring, even deadly, disease.
One week, the virus was in a giant pouched rat in an African rain forest; a few weeks later, in a 3-year-old Wisconsin farm girl playing with a cute little prairie dog her mother got at a 4-H swap meet.
The prairie dog unwittingly became a conduit for the virus after it was sucked from the ground by what amounts to a giant vacuum cleaner and then housed in close quarters with imported African rodents.
"Basically you factored out an ocean and half a continent by moving these animals around and ultimately juxtaposing them in a warehouse or a garage somewhere," said Jeffrey Davis, Wisconsin's epidemiologist.
Imagine what would happen, health experts say, if the germ had infected cats or dogs instead of prairie dogs. Or if the germ had been Ebola or severe acute respiratory syndrome - far more deadly diseases - instead of monkeypox.
"This one, fortunately, looks like we're going to get through this without any fatalities. The next one, we may not be so fortunate," said Jim Kazmierczak, Wisconsin's public health veterinarian.
For years, animal rights advocates have called for restrictions or bans on the trade of exotic and wild animals. Groups such as the American Veterinary Medical Association have lobbied for the same thing because of the public health risk.
But such calls have fallen on deaf ears. A temporary ban on importing African rodents was put in place because of monkeypox, but animals from other countries continue to stream into the United States and breeders keep raising and selling exotics on captive-bred farms in this country.
Will the monkeypox outbreak spur broader regulation?
"I think it's going to move now. As we say, opportunity knocks, and I think it's knocked pretty loudly here," said James Hughes, longtime director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"People have looked very hard for the source in nature of Ebola virus, and they haven't found it," Hughes added. "I certainly don't want to find it as the result of the importation of an infected animal."
Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, said he would bring the exotic pet issue to the Council on Public Health Preparedness on which he serves. It reports to Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson.
"It is a major public health issue," Benjamin said. "There's a growing recognition of the risk. There clearly needs to be much more aggressive federal action on this."
Some in the industry favor increased oversight.
Marshall Meyers, executive vice president of the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council, said he was surprised to learn that before the monkeypox outbreak no health protocols, such as a quarantine, had applied to the importation of African rodents. Imported birds and some mammals are quarantined when they enter the U.S., Meyers said.
Permits should be required for ownership of big cats, bears, venomous reptiles and other dangerous exotics, Meyers said. That would help ensure that the animals are in knowledgeable hands, he said.
Meyers acknowledged that exotic animals can spread disease, but the possibility of them bringing in a new illness is relatively small, he said.
Since the outbreak, the council, a 2,000-member trade group, says it is monitoring more than 500 legislative initiatives affecting the industry.
Monkey attack
The risk of injury from exotics has been evident for many years, and the victims often are children, notes the Animal Protection Institute, which has cataloged hundreds of examples in recent years of injuries caused by exotic or wild animals.
They include a 3-year-old Kentucky boy killed by a relative's tiger and a 6-year-old Florida girl attacked by a friend's cougar.
In southeastern Wisconsin, the story of a runaway monkey shows how bystanders can be harmed when owners cannot control their animals.
The monkey smashed through a porch wall, ran across George Mutter's backyard in Kansasville and fled into his garage. "I had the garage door open, and I didn't see it," Mutter, now 76, recalled after the Japanese macaque attacked him on an August morning in 2000.
Mutter was closing the garage door when the monkey suddenly jumped from the car and grabbed him by the waist.
"I tried to get it away, and then it slid down my leg and either bit me or scraped me," Mutter said.
Mutter fought off the monkey, and it ran away but turned and attacked again, according to a police report.
The monkey's next target was Renee DeGroot, who was attacked while delivering mail in her car. "Something hit me on the elbow, and all of a sudden I was bleeding," she said.
As a Racine County sheriff's deputy approached in a squad car, the monkey attacked DeGroot again. DeGroot, now 44, received three or four stitches.
The monkey's owner, Jacquelyn T. Thacker, pleaded no contest to a charge of interfering with a police officer and was ordered to pay a $335 fine, according to court records. The monkey was euthanized. Thacker could not be reached for comment.
When deputies talked to Thacker, though, they learned that she had taught her pet, Ronnie, to open soda cans and drink from them. Ronnie liked to crush them when he was done. Thacker told deputies she had found four empty beer cans left over from a neighbor's party; all appeared to have been crushed by Ronnie.
Whether the 8-year-old monkey was drunk or just excited was never clear.
Infections more common
Injuries involving exotic pets have been reported in virtually every state, but infections are even more common.
A 72-year-old Boston woman got pneumonia and died in 1998 from a fungal infection she acquired from a pet cockatoo, likely from airborne exposure to its cage droppings. She had had no direct contact with the bird.
Salmonella is the most common infection linked to exotic animals; it's carried by iguanas, snakes, lizards, turtles and other reptiles. More than 80,000 infections occur each year in the United States, said Fred Angulo, an epidemiologist who has studied the disease for a decade at the CDC.
Most victims are infants or young children who are least able to fend off the germs and often are infected without direct contact with the reptile, the CDC reports. Many develop deadly bloodstream infections or other illnesses.
A 6-week-old Ohio boy got meningitis from a pet turtle whose food and water bowls were washed in the kitchen sink, where they may have come into contact with items used to feed the child.
In Green Bay, a 5-month-old girl died in December 1998 of a strain of salmonella identical to one later cultured from the stool of an iguana in her home. Health officials think she became infected from crawling on carpeting that contained the animal's droppings. Salmonella bacteria have been known to remain viable for more than a year in the droppings.
"It's horrible. And the parents didn't know" the risk, said Kazmierczak, the state public health veterinarian.
Only a fraction of the infections that occur in Wisconsin are recognized for what they are and reported, said Davis, the state epidemiologist. One-third of the 117 reptile-associated salmonella infections reported in Wisconsin from 1998 to 2003 involved babies.
Breeders who handle reptiles acknowledge that the animals carry salmonella and can pass it to humans. But Kevin Hanley, a Milwaukee-area breeder of snakes and geckos, said good hygiene can limit the risk.
Chris Roscher, co-owner of L.A. Reptile, a large importer in Los Angeles, agreed.
"The people who make a big issue out of it (are) ridiculous," she said.
The problem was worse when a small turtle known as the red-eared slider was a popular pet in the early 1970s. Reptile-associated salmonella cases dropped 77% nationwide after turtles smaller than 4 inches were banned in 1975.
Herpes and hepatitis worries led the CDC to ban importation of primates as pets in the mid-1970s, and tick-borne heart water disease prompted an emergency ban on selling certain African tortoises in 2000, according to the Humane Society of the United States.
Regulating exotics
Kazmierczak said there are options short of a ban.
For pet reptiles, states could require sellers to provide information about the health hazards to anyone buying an animal. In Kansas, buyers sign forms acknowledging they have received such information, he said.
A CDC survey in March 1999 found that only three states had such regulations. And three states ban reptiles in day care centers and long-term care facilities.
Another option: require people to get a license or permit to have an exotic or dangerous pet. Such a measure could help ensure that they know how to take care of the animal and prevent injuries.
However, some fear that too much regulation could backfire. "You've got to be careful that you don't drive this underground," said Benjamin of the public health association.
For some animals, such as venomous snakes and large exotic cats such as cougars and tigers, a ban might be the only way to prevent injury or illness, some say.
"A venomous rattlesnake is a dangerous product," and it may need to be regulated the way other dangerous things such as guns are, said Stephen Hargarten, chief of emergency medicine at Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital and the Medical College of Wisconsin.
Craig Pelke, supervisor of the reptile house at the Milwaukee County Zoo, said very few people know how to safely keep a poisonous snake.
"Snakes are escape artists, and when you've got something that can kill you, it's just way too dangerous," he said.
The zoo regularly gets calls to help rescue people bitten by venomous snakes, said Deputy Director Bruce Beehler. Earlier this year, it rushed anti-venin to Minnesota, only to be stuck with the bill when the patient's insurance company refused to pay.
"The county taxpayers paid because of somebody in Duluth kissing their rattlesnake," he said.
At the CDC alone, 175 staffers have been working on monkeypox. Hundreds more at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Department of Health and Human Services and other agencies have been testing samples, tracing animals, investigating and treating human cases, and working on ways to contain the outbreak. State and city employees also have worked on it.
"We don't have people sitting around here waiting for stuff to happen," said the CDC's Hughes. "When things like this happen, we put other important things on the back burner."
Meanwhile, Virginia Day now lives with her mother in Algoma. Day has five pet king snakes, which are not venomous, and she said she's learned her lesson. "I've changed my opinions a lot about how you handle animals," she said.
Day, now 55, used to charge $3 for people to see the "Middle Earth Reptile Zoo" inside her 14-by-72-foot house trailer when she lived in Manitowoc County. She once had 167 snakes, plus lizards, in glass cages stacked to the ceiling, some covered only with light screens.
Day now thinks that people younger than 18 should not be able to buy poisonous snakes, but she defends the right for anyone else to own them.
"I think they're beautiful and that people need to learn more about them," she said.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/State/jul03/156575.asp
