Creatures Great and Small

Thousands of Bats Slaughtered Annually in Asia End up on eBay and Etsy

If you buy those cool little mummified bats and believe that they are simply found dead or by-kill, you should know that:

Between mid-2000 and 2013, the US imported at least 9,000 bats per year

Conservationists focusing on bats in Indonesia call it a “virtual certainty” that these bats are not being sustainably harvested, natural deaths, or bykill

With the taxidermy renaissance / vulture culture, I imagine that the number of bats imported has only increased

One conservationist said 9k per year was “probably only the tip of the iceberg” because they can’t check every package that enters the US

This is the standard of keeping ball pythons. Its the most common technique, and it IS widly spread.

We can do better than this. This kind of stuff doesnt allow for a range of natural behaviors. It makes us look like animal abusers. Yes, the animals survive, but they cannot thrive in this setting. There’s literally not enough room for even one of them to stretch all the way out.

We can do better. We have to do better because this isn’t good for the animals health wise, or even mentally. It also gives HSUS and PETA more grounds to ban reptiles as pets.

Enrichment provides animals with an outlet for natural behaviors and promotes healthy animals. There are tons of studies on the benefits of enrichment- it’s not an extra step- it’s necessary for the good of the animal and is part of proper husbandry.

Dont be like this picture; dare to do more.

Other species, like carpet pythons, I really don’t like tubs for. Using carpets as an example, those guys are active and move a lot and will make full use of the space provided to them. Balls really won’t.

Rack systems like the one in the picture are popular because they save money, time and space for the keeper when compared to setting them all up in fully furnished vivariums or large tubs. Giving them more space would address the concerns with them sitting in ammonia… If an animal does not have the ability to move away from its own waste that should be alarm bells that the enclosure is definatly not big enough (Though I know snakes love to sit ontop of it for no reason sometimes but at least they should have the option to be sensible). 

But  the issue is not JUST space because ball pythons are such a shy secretive species giving them more space also means they need proportionally more hides and visual barriers ect to feel secure… just scaling this tub up and saying “ta da- now you have more space” won’t work. So if you have a larger number of snakes…. That just starts to add up to a LOT of cleaning, a lot of space required and a large expense. 

The ball python industry wants to hold on to the outdated opinion that ball pythons “are scared of space, never move, and thrive in tiny barren tubs - Just add water!” because it’s how they turn profits… They also promote it to new people getting in to the hobby because otherwise that would be admitting they are not doing the best they can… This is also why its not something thats disscussed rationally in facebook groups either. It angers/upsets people that are in too deep to change their ways without going to huge extra costs or dramatically reducing the numbers of animals they have to make room for fewer better enclosures… So they would rather deny any is wrong to avoid that .. The argument also gets wrapped up with irrelavent details or oversimplified to “tanks vs tubs”… or “vivs vs tubs”.. or “naturalistic  looking vs non naturalistic looking”… 

At the end of the day this is an issue about good husbandy, good enclosure design and good animal welfare..which is not always cheap, nor is it always good for “productivity”. The truth of it is that there is NO scientific studies confirming that small barren tubs allow snakes to thrive and PLENTY of evidence that environmental enrichment is beneficial for their welfare. Restricting stimuli captive animals are exposed to is not good for their physical and psychological well-being and can negativly impact behavioural expression,neural development, learning ability, activity levels and even lead to chornic stress, immunosuppression and thus increased disease susceptibility. 

Ball pythons are victims of their own hardiness and adaptability…they may not show stress or appear to suffer when kept like this as much as a more active colubrid might…. But that still doesn’t make it an acceptable standard. They still eat, shed, poop and breed, which is all well and good, but not necessarily an indicator of good welfare.

It also sets a worrying trend for how the hobby itself measures and assesses reptile welfare and quality of life…. Already the model of  “ if it eats, poops, sheds and breeds then its thriving” has spread and is applied to keeping other more active species… I’ve seen arboreal asian colubrids in the same 6″ high tubs with no climbing stuff, even etbs, gtps, atbs, kept in similar barren set ups…..retics and other large constrictors in boxes they can not even stretch out half their length in ect ect…unless they drop dead or rub their faces off in stress the individual animal or even the whole species, will get the stamp of approval for “doing fine in a tub!”.  

This is not how animal welfare scientistis assess welfare. And as @wheremyscalesslither  mentioned when our hobby is under attack from animal rights groups we have GOT to do better… and promote husbandry based on science. 

TL: DR,  You said you made the effort to provide some enrichment yourself. Rest assured it is not just for you, and will absolutley benefit your animals! If you are interested to read more about it I also have an article on it here 

Prior to coming across the right online communities, my exposure to reptile owners basically involved hearing guys laughing about live feeding, including gloating over how their reptile made the animal scream as it was caught and killed (One of my longest running babysitters raised hamsters as live feeders for reptile owners in our town), seeing reptiles treated as some kind of status symbol to be paraded around, and seeing reptiles kept/treated/spoken of as though they were objects.

It was a real turn off to say the least. My mom was also basically of the opinion that reptiles were not appropriate pets, and I wonder if that opinion really had more to do with bad husbandry/bad owners than the animals themselves. She certainly doesn’t seem to take any issue with my foray into the world of gecko ownership. Granted, she has a soft spot for wild geckos. She might still hold the same attitude about snake ownership as she used to.

There really aren’t “so many birds”. The populations of many species are rapidly declining due to habitat loss and pollution. I’ve seen birds of prey autopsied and their insides are often coated in plastics. Pesticides and rodenticides wipe out truly horrifying numbers of larger birds - please only ever use mechanical traps for mice and rats, not poisons.

So, the history of Wildlife law in the United States goes way back, actually, to the history of wildlife law in Great Britain.

See, in Ye Olden Days, the King was in charge of deciding who was and wasn’t legally allowed to hunt. This was a Big Deal, because many people needed to hunt to feed and clothe themselves and their families. If the King said “you can’t hunt anywhere near where you live because those are My Deer,” you were, well, fucked.

Eventually, this power of wildlife ownership was technically redelegated to parliment, but hunting often remained super inaccessible to anyone but the wealthy, privileged few.

So when people started coming here from there, it was a total free-for-all. You could hunt anywhere, anything! There were things to shoot in the US that had been extinct in the British aisles for centuries, even!

So not only were people hunting for food, clothing, to drive out unwanted animals (see: wolves), but also for the hell of it because they were allowed!

For a while though, hunting was still very much an “I need to eat” business. Can’t fault ‘em for eating, ya know?

But once Europeans became really established here, with cities and leisure time and fashion, things got way out of hand.

There were pretty much No laws dictating how many animals a person could take, or when and from where they could take them.

What’s more is, suddenly, it wasn’t just for food, it was for MASS PRODUCTION! You know what women REALLY wanted? Hats With Feathers. Lots Of Feathers.

People were already killing Many Birds, but not Enough. “We need to kill WAY MORE BIRDS and FASTER,” they said. So they made These Big Guns.

They were made for mounting on boats, and who gave a damn about ammo? ANYTHING that could presumably maim a duck was a go. They loaded them with pieces of tin, metal, shards of broken glass, ya know. The usual.

Then, at night, during Mating season, they’d go out onto the water, shine a light so that all the ducks raised their heads to investigate, fire the gun, and instantly decapitate hundreds of ducks a shot. It was wild.

So this was happening

And the REASON this was happening was there was a demand for these ducks, feathers, mainly. Meat second.

The demand is what’s imperative here. It didn’t matter if you had the means to kill 100 or 1000 birds in a night. If you shot ‘em, someone would pay for ‘em.

You can see where this started going wrong, however. Eventually, there were like, uh, no birds left to shoot.

So now everyone’s starting to say, “well, what the hell…it seems that shooting All Of The Birds At Once has somehow wiped them out. Maybe we should do something about this.”

NOW, that was NOT a popular move. People were really loving the whole “I can kill anything any time I want” thing going on. They argued that limiting their take would violate their rights and freedoms (never mind the hypocrisy of claiming any rights to the wildlife of this land that had been taken from the indigenous peoples they’d killed and driven out).

But responsible hunters knew that wildlife and hunting laws were imperative to the continued existence of wildlife.

This wasn’t a new concept, mind you. Responsible Wildlife laws are even in the damn Old Testament:

“If you come across a bird’s nest in any tree or on the ground, with young ones or eggs and the mother sitting on the young or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young.” Deuteronomy 22:6

Makes sense, right? Eat the eggs but make sure the mother remains to lay more. 

And more than a century before, John Quincey Adams is quoted in reference to the issue:

“I went with my gun down upon the marshes, but had no sport. Game laws are said to be directly opposed to the liberties of the subject; I am well persuaded that they may be carried to far, and that they really are in most parts of Europe. But it is equally certain that where there are none, there is never any game; so that the difference between the country where laws of this kind exist and …where they are unknown must be that in the former very few individuals will enjoy the privilege of hunting and eating venison, and in the latter this privilege will be enjoyed by nobody.”

ANYWAY. Point was, people were realizing that if things didn’t change fast, there’d be nothing left to hunt, to eat, or to use for Fancy Hats.

So we got the Lacey Act of 1900, the first federal wildlife law.

“I have always been a lover of birds, and I always been a hunter as well, for today there is no friend that the birds have like a sportsman-the man who enjoys legitimate sport. He protects them out of season; he kills them with moderation in season.”  John Lacey.

It limited market-hunting and commercial wildlife trafficking. People with Super Duck Guns were especially unhappy about this. However, if ducks understood federal laws, they would’ve been thrilled.

The problem was, there was still a HUGE demand for feathers, for meat, and absurdly, for specimen for people’s private collections. “I don’t CARE if that’s the last known living Auk. I want it.”

So they had it.

What we needed to do was to destroy the demand for bird products. And to destroy the demand, we had to stop products from being made. If no one is walking down the street wearing a Fancy Bird Hat, no one else is going to say “oh! I want one too,” and no one is going to pay a Fancy Hat Maker to pay a Big Duck Gun owner to shoot 1,000 birds.

So we got the Migratory Bird Treat of 1918, which made it almost totally across the board illegal to own Any bird parts (excluding legal game birds, but laws about when and how many you could hunt were forming to protect them).

 There is a misnomer that taking something off the legal market will increase demand because people love what they can’t have. That’s proven untrue in this case. Very few people are actually willing to break Actual Federal Law in order to own a hat they can’t wear in public. The issue was larger society and for the most part law-abiding citizens who wore this stuff while it was legal but moved on once it wasn’t.

The reason it still exists is to keep the demand for bird parts non-existent, and it’s WHY you can’t legally collect feathers even when they fall off a bird naturally.

Because hey, YOU may live in an area with a healthy golden eagle population. Or a Blue Jay population. Or Red headed woodpeckers. YOU find their feathers all the time! They just fall off, no harm done.

So you pick them up, make them into cool jewelry and art, and post them on your etsy and pinterest.

They’re super popular! People love them!

Now I want in on that business!

But there aren’t many golden eagles, blue jays, or woodpeckers around me, so I don’t find their feathers often. But you know what’s way easier than looking for one, fallen feather? Shooting a bird and getting a lot at once.

And thus an innocent market has once again created an unsustainable demand that will threaten bird populations.

And that’s why it’s just flat out against Federal US law to own, collect, or sell almost any wild bird parts!

And MAKE NO MISTAKE! This law is Very Enforced. Wildlife officers Do pay attention to people talking about collected bird parts, and they Will throw the book at you. The fines are wild. Don’t risk it.

Biologists and veterinarians across the central and eastern United States are calling on researchers at the University of Illinois to help them identify, understand and potentially treat snake fungal disease, a baffling affliction affecting more than a dozen species of wild and captive snakes in at least 15 states.

Guinea pigs are one of the few animals that cannot produce their own vitamin C and must get it through their diet. Low vitamin C is one of the most common causes of disease in guinea pigs and can lead to respiratory infections, scurvy, dental disease, and death. Anytime I have a sick guinea pig as a patient, I almost always give a Vitamin C injection because they are too low.

Guinea pigs need about 25 mg of vitamin C a day, 40 for pregnant sows. While pelleted diets do contain added vitamin C, by the time you purchase a bag most of it has been degraded. Water additives also are quickly degraded and most guinea pigs couldn’t drink enough water to get the right amount anyway.

The best way to ensure your guinea pigs are getting enough vitamin C is to offer it through fresh foods every day. Here is a handy list of foods and how much you have to feed each guinea pig a day to get around 25 mg.

Guava- 1.1 tbsp

Red Bell Pepper- 2.1 tbsp

Green Bell Pepper- 3.4 tbsp

Kale- 1/3 C

Parsley- 1/3 C

Cauliflower- 4 flowerets

when you look up emerald tree boa, like 30% of the photos are mislabeled green tree pythons 

if u look up corallus caninus, the latin name for ETB, it’s better, but still some are green tree pythons, omg how confusing for the world of google   

TWO EASIEST WAYS TO TELL: 

1. The heat pits: ETB have a long line of heat pits above their mouth that starts from the front of their snout and continues all the way back to the back of their mouth. GTP only have six distinct triangular-shaped heat pits above their lip in the very front, like other morelia species.

2. Scale count: ETB have some distinctive large, flat scales on their snout. GTP have a much higher scale count on their snout- small and round and all over the place.

“They look nothing li—”

baby ducks act a lot like baby chickens so in the beginning it wasn’t so bad

the main problem is that baby ducks  LOVE water, but baby chickens get very very dead from it,

so you can imagine the mother hens surprise and horror the first time they go by the farm pond and ALL THE BABIES RUN TO THE WATER AND JUMP IN

my grandmother had to come out of the house to investigate all the noise the hen was making

The mother hen was clucking and screeching in distress and running circles around the pond while the duckies were having the time of their lives.

This happened a few more times before Momma hen was like FUCK IT YOU WANNA SWIM SEE WHAT I CARE , and would sit a distance away watching them in the pond.