Dogs may be our best friends, but some people take interest in far more unusual choices for pets. Whether it be driven by a desire for a display of status, a sense of adventure, or simply an interest in doing something different, keeping exotic pets presents a series of problems.

Exotic pets by definition come from a different ecosystem, and they pose the threat of carrying with them invasive species. An East Asian fungus threatens to wipe out American salamanders. This fungus arrives in part on Chinese fire belly newts, which are particularly popular and are imported into the United States by the hundreds of thousands annually. Salamanders play an underappreciated and barely visible yet vital role in the environment. Keeping specific insect populations in check, they subsequently serve as food for certain rodents and small predators that in turn operate in important manners. Each animal is an important link in a chain, the removal of which could induce a fracturing of the delicate structure.

Snakes are another common type of exotic pet, relatively popular in Florida. It is unfortunate how frequently one hears a story on the news about a pet snake escaping. Something like a python is huge and powerful, and can turn on its owner or on people whom it may come across as it flees. Small children and other pets, like small dogs, are susceptible. I know someone whose friend had a pet python that escaped. She said that one day they flipped open the toilet lid and found it in there. This must surely have been quite a shock, and is a very unsettling place to find a dangerous wild animal! Furthermore, because snakes of this kind are predatory and already at the top of the food chain, introducing them into an environment of which they were not previously a part can be just as damaging as the salamander situation. In this case, though, the snake itself is the invasive species, multiplying out of control as there is nothing to keep it in check, while feeding unchallenged on the prey of its choice, potentially endangering the populations of those animals.

Courtesy of Katy Warner via Flickr.

The reason that animals like pythons have a tendency to escape and are quite capable of subsequently surviving is that they are wild. Ancient humans were only able to domesticate fourteen species of large herbivorous animals: sheep, goats, cows, pigs, horses, Arabian (one humped) camels, Bactrian (two humped) camels, llamas, donkeys, reindeer, water buffalo, yaks, Bali cattle, and the mithan, which is also something of a relative to cattle. The primary means by which humans did this was to tap into their social structure. Horses, for example, live hierarchically. Therefore a human must replace the alpha male at the top of the pyramid and the rest of the group will follow. It is worth noting that wolves also have a hierarchical social structure. Thus one will notice that dogs are more naturally submissive to humans than cats, whose relatives and ancestors do not adhere to these same patterns.

It is more complicated than that, though. Some relatives of domesticated animals cannot be domesticated for other reasons. For example, zebras simply cannot be saddled, ridden, and trained the way horses can. Although they have the same hierarchal social structure as horses, other factors including diet, complications over captive breeding, or genetic traits tied into disposition or a propensity to panic will render an animal non-domesticable. Any individual trait, much less a combination of them, will yield this result, making an animal unsuitable to be a pet.

Ethical questions also present themselves with regard to keeping wild animals as pets. Aside from farm foul, no other type of bird is domesticable. Yet these are not uncommon sights in people’s homes. Having the ability to fly, birds possess a supreme gift of nature, one that mankind himself has dreamed about and aspired to throughout his existence. Nonetheless we selfishly deprive pet birds of it so that we can look at them while they sit perched in a small cage, denying them the ability to do what they are built to do.

Courtesy of elwarren via Flickr.

On a similar note, no types of predators should serve as pets either. In a somewhat Hollywood-esque conceptualization, we think of keeping something like a tiger as a pet as a demonstration of machismo and power. High-ranking antagonists in movies threaten to throw their adversaries to their vicious tigers like slabs of meat. But just the same as birds and their desire to fly, an apex predator is driven by its genes to hunt. We can poetically describe the action of handing a hunter its food instead of letting it pursue the hunt itself as killing its soul, but in a sense this is what is occurring. Whatever concepts of status we might procure are not worth the price of the damage consequently inflicted on such an animal. In addition, animals like this hold an appeal because of their wildness. If we take that away we negate its very mystique.

Once again we are attempting to tame aspects of nature that are beyond our control, with damaging consequences. We do not need to imprison wild animals in our homes in order to appreciate them. It would be much more productive to environmental consciousness to instead journey out into the wilderness ourselves and see them in their own element, where they belong.

Franklin R. Halprin

Franklin R. Halprin holds an MA in History & Environmental Politics from Rutgers University where he studied human-environmental relationships and settlement patterns in the nineteenth century Southwest. His research focuses on the influences of social and cultural factors on the development of environmental policy. Contact Frank at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Do you know what is lurking beneath the crawl space of your house? Even if you think you do, you should probably go check because you might find some surprising things. Recently, Dwayne Melton found this out the hard way. You see, buried beneath the belly of his house lay 13 tarantulas. As you might expect, he was horrified when he realized this. There were supposed to be 18 tarantulas hibernating under there. And he would not even have realized that five of his pets had been stolen if he hadn’t gotten a call from the exotic pet store from whence the arachnids had originally been purchased. See? This is why you should do regular crawl space investigations.

Courtesy of Giphy.

(Now, before I say more about this week’s weird story, I have a couple of disclaimers: 1. I went to college in Cobb County where the criminal in this story resides; and 2. I, like most middle school girls, had a pet tarantula when I was growing up. His name was Harry, and I was never so scared in my life as I was the day I learned tarantulas shed their skin, making what appears to a 12-year-old girl a second, cloned tarantula that showed up miraculously overnight.)

A lot of what happened here is unknown as the Cobb County man being charged is still at large; however, what is known is that Melton was going about his day, thinking everything was good and his tarantulas were hibernating peacefully deep below his house. But those spiders were not the only ones that lurked there. A spider thief had found his way to the spider’s den.

This would have been the perfect crime. Since the tarantulas were hibernating, Melton was not checking them as often as he might, and it is possible that by the time the theft was discovered, the thief would have been long gone. However, this particular robber made a fatal flaw that led to him not getting the payback he would have received and might also get him arrested: he went to the local exotic pet store, Animart, to try to sell the tarantulas.

This is something that should go without saying, but I see now that it does, in fact, have to be said: if you steal an exotic pet from someone who is clearly a collector/breeder, do not go to the local exotic pet store to sell them. Go out of town for that.

If a pet is exotic, that probably means it is not as common a household pet, which means that someone who purchased 18 of them from a store is probably a pretty well-known client. Of course, Melton could have gone to another store or purchased them out of town or any number of other things, but why risk it? Make the chance of you getting caught that much lower and just go three towns over or something.

Not doing this is, at least partly, what got this man caught. (I don’t know enough about the tarantula trade to confidently say that no exotic pet store would find it suspicious to have a person try to sell it five tarantulas at once. However, if it wasn’t for the fact that the store knew the owner, I have to imagine it is much less likely this plan would have been foiled.)

When the thief took the animals to Animart, they looked at them, thought they might be Molten’s, and bought them for $60. Does it seem like a life of crime might be for you if money is the result? Well, since the spiders were worth about $60 each, it was not such a good payday for this man.

After the sale, the store called Molten and told him they thought they had his pets and asked him to come ID them (which shows this guy knew what he was doing in the spider world, because to me, one tarantula looks exactly like the one next to it–especially when the one next to it is actually the shell of his old tarantula skin that had been shed). He rushed home to check on his other 13 spiders and found them safe in their containers.

Courtesy of Giphy.

So there you have it, if you want to get rid of your spider problems in a more humane way, just cross your fingers and hope you have a spider thief lurking somewhere underneath your home.

Ashley Shaw

Ashley Shaw is an Alabama native and current New Jersey resident. A graduate of both Kennesaw State University and Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, she spends her free time reading, writing, boxing, horseback riding, playing trivia, flying helicopters, playing sports, and a whole lot else. So maybe she has too much spare time. Contact Ashley at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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