The title exotic animal categorizes a wide range of a variety of diverse animals from each animal kingdom. These beautiful creatures may be associated under one term but they are all lethal in their own way. Often times when these animals are forced into the common household their lethalness is not subdued but instead it increases. Clifford Warwick and Catrina Steedman’s article “Injuries, Envenomations and Stings from Exotic Pets” from the Journal Of The Royal Society Of Medicine proves so through numerous amounts of statistics that present the rising or persistent injuries reported due to an exotic pet. Typically the categories were sorted into vertebrate and invertebrate then from these two into subcategories. Each subcategory was a percentage of population or the rate of change over a given amount of time. From the percentage of the pet population subcategory it was proven that usually the most severe injuries were from exotic pets even though they make up the smallest portion of pets among households. When focusing on the percent increase over time, exotic pets had a substantial increase when viewing at the number of homes they are becoming a part of. Most of these pet cause injuries that are more severe and rare than the common household pet could cause. Exotic pets have been associated with causing thousands of days spent over night in the hospital due to the severity of the attack. Also some injuries require specific remedies that may not be easily accessed or performed. Therefore with the lack of accessibility to the certain aid it can cause worsening of the injury, infection, or death. Thus the article pursued the purpose of raising awareness of these injuries for exotic pet owners and for medics to properly inform their patients.
Animals are unpredictable to begin with; however, exotic animals that have characteristics that are not like the typical pets are even more erratic. I understand the beauty, rarity and adorableness of these animals are very appealing but that is not reason enough to make them pets. Obviously through these statistics it is proven that their beauty overshadows their danger too. People do not typically consider all the aspects of owning an exotic animal as a pet especially the possibility of it lashing out. One thing the article did not highlight was the cause behind these attacks. Exotic animals are not meant to be contained in small areas but larger more diverse that are suitable to that pet’s needs. A certain part of the article that stood out to me was a statistic that presented the increase in exotic animals in the common household. This part directly correlates to the statistic about the exotic pet causing more severe injury than the common pet because if the population increases so will the amount of severe injuries. This article is so beneficial to my audience because it supports my purpose of raising awareness about the unknown and uncommon. It not only raises awareness for the pet owners but for the medics as well. Since these animals do not originate from the local areas of the owners thus medics do not typically fully understand their characteristics. By not understanding the animals, medics cannot properly care for their patients or inform them of how to avoid these kinds of attacks again. So I praise this article for contributing so positively and efficiently to the cause of raising awareness for the uncommon inhabitants of this world. Understanding is key component of being able to help others and people do not need to be medics to understand these kinds of animals so they too can help if the unfortunate incident of an attack occurs.
