Exotic animals in privat hands in the UK

Article about exotic animal-keeping in the UK :
Wild animals at UK homes include lions, zebras and crocodiles - BBC News

 

I fail to see why there's the great concern that the article mentions in the formal ownership; in theory these animals are all legally owned and the owners went through the proper channels to gain a licence to keep them. If there is any concern then it shouldn't be with the private individual but with the licence system itself - and any potential check-up/monitoring system build into that licence.

Illegal ownership and acquisition is a separate matter and would be present with or without legal ownership channels.


Personally I would argue that trying to restrict private ownership would likely be more detrimental than advantageous. Legal controls should be present, but directly blocking potential ownership (as one of the linked threads suggests was on the cards) would only encourage the black market which in turn tends to be more detrimental to wild stocks.

If anything there should be more open and free information and exchange. There should be no reason that privately owned animals could not form part of institutionally owned breeding programs or other initiatives.

Of course some critically endangered animals would likely be worth adding to a black list; however I think that should be handled more carefully than just an outright ban. If anything it would benefit the international community to support those private individuals willing and skilled in supporting rare species and I would hazard that an open community would have more chance to prevent ownership or at least inform and educate than a closed one.

 

I am from Northern Ireland and the Belfast Telegraph posted a similar list for Northern Ireland. It is very surprisingly easy to require exotic mammals and birds, especially from Ireland and I work at an exotic pet farm that is not currently open.
For instance at the farm there have two coatimundis (Nasua nasua) and three raccoons which require a license. What I find most shocking is the minimum enclosure size for animals requiring the license. The raccoons and coatimundis use to live in awfully small fully indoor enclosures which did not meet the animals requirement. There was also no natural substrate or any attempt at enrichment. Their current enclosure although an improvement are still lacking.
However, there are many equally exotic animals that do not require licenses. At the farm there is a breeding mob of 8+ Bennetts wallabys, a small group of 4 meerkats, which I have got into numerous arguments over their enclosure, and 4 prairie dogs, which are also in a shocking enclosure. There are also emus, rheas, a single fallow deer and a single patagonian mara. Along with this are over 10 species of pheasants including some rarities such as the Himalayan Monal and Temminicks Tragopan.
If you would like to see any pictures of any of the animals or enclosures I would be happy to post them. I will also answer any questions you might have including the cost of certain animals.

 

I'd be curious to see the enclosures. Also curious about the dimensions, if you can get them. Prairie dogs are generally kept in ferret cages in the United States (up to two in a single dual-level cage), and seem to do fine with it, though the people who keep them provide enrichment within the cage and let them out frequently.

Meerkats are sadly illegal in the United States. The Fish and Wildlife Service claims that they are banned under the original text of the Lacey Act, even though anyone capable of reading can see that the only mongoose species banned under the original act is the highly-invasive Small Asian mongoose. I had a long and largely fruitless conversation with the FWS about this. As near as I can tell, in 1957 a bunch of non-invasive species were added to the list of injurious wildlife including the dhole and the majority of the mongoose family. The request for public comment did not state what changes were being made, and it does not seem that the FWS was aware that the new rules were adding mongoose species to the ban.

Meerkats of course are not invasive, and it looks like the ban may be the work of one overzealous FWS employee messing with the proposed draft rules and nobody else catching it. Bureaucratic intransigence means that the FWS is unwilling to admit that they don't really know why meerkats are banned, let alone that it might have made a mistake. Unfortunately, as long as we have a strong animal rights lobby and a weak exotic pet lobby, the ban is likely to remain in place.

Any rate, I like the UK's rules much better than what the US has. The UK's system seems to be a simple, tiered system where pretty much everything is legal, but the more difficult the animal the more stringent the regulations. The US has a patchwork of state laws, while at the federal level the FWS has the power to ban animals at will under the Lacey Act and ESA and the CDC can effectively ban animals by banning the import of new ones. Native birds are pretty much banned under the MBTA, which also bans a lot of British birds like the hoopoe and chaffinch, but you're allowed to have native game birds for eating and hunting, raptors for falconry, and any rehabilitated bird which can't be released into the wild (the last two requiring a license).

Now you might argue that the UK's laws are two lax for meerkats and prairie dogs, and that at the minimum you should be required to know their basic care requirements. I'd be fine with that, though I wonder if overly small enclosures can't be prosecuted under existing animal welfare regulations. But the think I love about the UK's laws is that almost nothing is completely banned, and they are very sensible in how they're applied. (In Texas you can have a lion or a chimp as a pet with a license but not a fennec fox or three-banded armadillo. In Massachusetts you can have a bison or ostrich without any license but cannot have a lesser hedgehog tenrec or pied crow as a pet at all.)

 

Zyg your post is very interesting as my impression was that the USA was far more permissive than the UK in terms of resrticted pet laws. So its curious to see somone from the USA giving a totally opposite view. I guess part of it might be the ^grass is greener on the other side^ effect, whilst another might just be that the UK tends to hear more about the tigers annd lion pet situations that go wrong than of the restrictions

 

On a national level, the United States is far more permissive than the UK in terms of what you can keep without a license. Some states are fairly permissive as well.

However between the MBTA banning most native birds and a lot of British birds as well, and the broad powers the FWS and CDC have and their willingness to use them, I believe that the variety of animals you can keep in the UK is larger than in the US even on the federal level.

Now, some states also have very lax rules on exotic animals, including large and dangerous exotics, though that number is rapidly declining. I think Nevada is one of the few remaining states that lets basically anyone have a tiger if they have the money to buy one. However since I think that requiring licensing to keep a tiger is a good thing, and Nevada (like most states) won't let you have a raccoon under any circumstances; I would much rather live under the UK's regime where a license is required to keep both tigers and raccoons, but l can keep meerkats and jackdaws.

So if you want to keep large and dangerous charismatic megafauna with a minimum of paperwork, the US is the place to be. If you want to keep birds and smaller carnivores without facing frustrating restrictions, and if you want a law that is sensibly-designed, if slightly more stringent than I'd make it (I think the UK requires licenses for Cuvier's dwarf caiman, for example), the UK is the place to be.

 

To be fair smaller animals are typically far bigger risks when it comes to invasive species problems than larger fauna. Larger animals tend to breed slower and are much easier to hunt. Thus one can argue that stricter controls on smaller things is a good thing as it helps to reduce the chances of escapees causing trouble (and generally speaking one only finds out something is "invasive" when it enters a situation where it can be invasive).

 

That is a fair point in principle. However every introduction of an invasive species I know of whose origin is verifiable stemmed from one of the following:

1. Brought over accidentally on boats or planes (rats, zebra mussels, brown tree snakes).
2. Deliberately introduced (starlings, rabbits, cane toads).
3. Mass escapes or releases from trucks, breeders, or pet shops (nutria, house finches, Burmese pythons).

I know of no examples where individually released pets have become invasive species. In every case where someone has told me about about exotic pets becoming a scourge, either the original feral population is traceable to one of the other manners of introduction I described, the the origin of the original feral population is unclear (but often other populations of the same species are traceable to one of these other manners of introduction, or the species has not actually become established.

I've come to the conclusion that while "exotic pets are creating an environmental catastrophe" stories are popular with media outlets who like a sensational story and animal rights groups who want to ban exotic pets, they're essentially a meme with roots in urban legend.

Now, pet stores improperly securing and even releasing animals is a problem, and for that that reason, I'm fine exercising an unusual degree of caution in regards to particularly delicate ecoystems such as Hawaii. (I also wish that it weren't possible to get live animals, except as food, from pet stores at all, but that's a different matter.) I would prefer that those jurisdictions limit the numbers of any particular species that can be in the same place and/or require sterilization prior to import rather than an outright ban, but I'm OK with bans.

However banning all animals as pets until it can be proven that they're not invasive is something which I strongly oppose in jurisdictions that aren't isolated island ecosystems.

 

Cats (more locally dogs, too?). They certainly have plenty of problems with feral felines in places historically isolated from that sort of predators (Australia, New Zealand, Caribbean Islands, etc). There are quite a few aquatic: Primarily fish, but also pond sliders. Perhaps the best known recent example is lionfish, but also pumpkinseed sunfish, topmouth gudgeon, etc.

I notice you discount Burmese python. Has its source been established? Repeated release/escaped pets certainly seem at least as likely as "Mass escapes or releases from trucks, breeders, or pet shops".

 

The source of the small burm population in extreme south florida is the result of a hurricane destroying a warehouse with a freshly imported baby burmese pythons in it in I think 1992 (hurricane andrew) dna testing recently proved this. it's extremely unlikely that is someone is irresponsible enough to release a pet, that they would make their way out to the everglades to do it, let alone it happening on a large enough scale to create a self sustaining population.

 

so the population has little genetic diversity, meaning they are from a small amount of founding stock, and a suitable number of founding stock escaped around the time that seems to match up (and it's not a story that's made up either, it happened) so while it might not definitely be able to say they are from those animals (because we don't have the dna profiles of those original animals) it sure as hell points in that direction.