Article in local paper quoting Tropical Wings as stating there has been an increase in peoples interest in meerkats since the adverts for comparethemeerkat.com and also people wanting to keep them as pets! Zoo - meerkats not suitable as pets - East Anglian Daily Times Can you even buy meerkats?? What an awful idea, they may look cute on the advert but really can't believe people would think that Aleksandr was a real meerkat
We saw a pair in a garden centre pet shop near us about a month ago. They were there about 3 weeks but we visited afterwards and they had gone so I don't know if they had been bought or were just on show. They were just in an ordinary cage next to the guinea pigs and rabbits!
I won't name it but there is a place in Staffordshire that sells baby Meerkat's to the generel public no questions asked. I have never been and seen them for myself but a friend bought one and it died a week later. It's a cruel practice that if I had my way would be banned.
It's possible, but you must be a highly trained exotic keeper to do so. If you look up a few exotic pet forums, you can usually find a few mentions of people keeping meerkats. What's going on there is '101 Dalamations Effect'; where a film, show, advert, anything that features a cute or small animal will lead to demand in them as pets with people not realising the responsibility. It's happened with terrapins and TMNTs, clownfish and Finding Nemo, etc. Fortunately, there was no demand in keeping lions, gorillas and giant pandas as pets with the releases of the Lion King, the Cadburys advert or Kung Fu Panda.
Blimey I must have a sheltered life I wonder what sort of conditions the general public would keep them in? maybe a cage with just a dirt box like a chinchilla?
i can't believe that anyone would consider buying a meerkat as a pet. i can't imagine they would make great pets and no doubt the majority will be kept in unsuitable conditions. keeping unsuitable exotic pets should be banned!
Meerkats as pets sounds like a terrible idea to me (I've never heard of it before). For the meerkats sake, let us hope that it won't become a future trend. Thank God for that
Knowing what drummers are like I wouldn't keep anything that played drums as a pet anyway! Seriously though, I keep hamsters at the moment and am considering, after my first hamster passes away which won't be for a while yet hopefully, graduating to keeping rats. There is no way I would even consider something like meerkats and, personally, I would even class chinchilla's and degu's as exotics as they require such specialist care. Degu's are unable to produce insulin and are therefore prone to being naturally diabetic! I would imagine meerkats would make ferrets seem like warm cuddly creatures! Nope, when I see animals on TV I just want to see them in their natural habitat even more. People wanting them as pets shows gross ignorance of the animal. Mind you, I also think people should do their research before even getting a pet of any type!
Yep, the place I mentioned also has the pygmy hedgehogs. People make me sick with their latest wants - particularly when animals are concerned then they find they can't keep them or they aren't as cute as they thought and then neglect them or set them free. Exotic pets should be banned as was said earlier.
Anyone want to make a bet of how many meerkats will be kept on their own? Honestly I'm not against keeping exotics (within reason) but there needs to be a line drawn somewhere.
I'm not against keeping exotics pets so long as they recieve the care and conditions they need; liscensing their ownership would be a good idea, as it might well put off those less serious (the ones who get them purely for fad reasons). I have been hoping to get have some more unusual exotics one day (after I gain experiance with a wider array of animals than dogs), such as sugar gliders and African pygmy hedgehogs. However, I still wouldn't ever get any without having the money to first build a suitable shed/run, or covert part of a room (or even whole!) into a small forest. The idea of keeping parrots in those little cages makes me sick - nothing short of a tailored conservatory whenever I get my birds!
I am not condoning the keeping of any exotic animal in inadequate conditions, but as an exotic animal keeper who takes the care of my animals VERY seriously I am down right offended by some comments in this thread. Please consider those who are responsible when saying all exotics should be banned. I would agree that more enforcement is required as to who can keep these animals, but banning the trade all together would not be as beneficial as some think. It will just force it underground to the black market and make it even more difficult to police! Work is needed to educate people and to show some them that they can not provide for certain species in the hope that perhaps they can be discouraged from taking on animals like Meerkats. I have countless friends who between them keep various exotic species and all of them maintain the highest standards in animal care.
I agree, I don't think the problem is keeping the animal itself, the problem is the fact that it's being sold in a pet shop to the average punter, and by the sounds of it, with very little discrimination. What's the current situation for licencing at the minute, am I right in thinking the laws were relaxed a year or two ago, allowing more exotics to kept without a licence? I'm not sure that's a good idea.
It was relaxed recently, surely it would be easier to have licence with varying grades and depending on the grade depended on what you could keep. The higher the grade the more stringent the inspections. (Another lovely little tax for the government as well )
As an 'exotics keeper' I'm also rather insulted by the generalised and ill thought out comments that have been posted here. Although i'm quite sure that there are many people that do crave unusual pets for the novelty factor or in response to the latest fad, there are also private hobbyists out there who maintain their animals to extremely high standards, often far better than many zoos who, as we all know, tend to focus there efforts on the more charismatic species. (and yes I am very aware that some zoos do have excellent small mammal facilities). I often wonder how many people who outright condemn the keeping of non domesticated pets actually give any thought to the huge welfare issues surrounding the far more popular pets such as rabbits and dogs. Why should a captive bred pet meerkat cause such outrage when it is still perfectly within the law for anyone over the age of 16 to go and buy a puppy without any thought as to what will happen when it loses the cute factor. Most pet dogs spend their entire lives on their own for the majority of the day.Or why is is still considered acceptable to keep a solitary rabbit in a hutch at the end of a garden? As I said i'm not condoning the impulse purchase of any animal, whether it be meerkat, hamster, goldfish or stick insect, but lets try and keep things in perspective shall we. And to clarify, you do not need any form of licence to buy or keep a meerkat. They are not listed on the DWAA. Its also worth mentioning that African pygmy hedgehogs and sugar gliders have been fairly widely bred and sold in the UK for the last 10 years or so. Provided a prospective owner has thought about what they are doing and have set up appropriate housing, I dont see why it should cause such shock and outrage. Anyway, thats my rant over with. If you're going to keep an animal in captivity, do it properly or not at all.
I think what is concerning people is that they wont be kept properly by people that are just buying them as a fad and actually have no idea of their needs. Just because you can buy one doesn't necessarily make it right for just anyone to keep one. They seemed to be priced at around £650 on the link, so hopefully will put them out of a lot of peoples price range. I want to know is what sort of enclosure cage etc is being sold to keep them in at these pet shops? Or how exactly do you provide suitable living conditions in your back garden? Do you think zoos should do something to discourage children/people from wanting to own one? Maybe a low priced adoption scheme or educational talks including how unsuitable they can be for a fad pet?
In the UK you only need a licence for the species covered by the Dangerous Wild Animals Act 1976. The schedule of species was revised a little while ago, it can be downloaded from the DEFRA website http://www.defra.gov.uk/wildlife-countryside/pdf/protection/dwa-animallist.pdf Of course the Animal Welfare Act 2006 applies to all species, so you have to keep any animal properly having regard for all its welfare needs. Alan
Appreciate what your saying karenZoo but you could say the same about any pet, exotic or otherwise. I'm pretty sure that the Andrex adds resulted in an increase in the number of labrador puppies being sold in the classified adds of newspapers across the UK. And i'm equally sure that many of these puppies ended up in rescue centres or euthanased because they didn't play happily with the loo roll or grew up and became less cute. Any animal that is available for sale has the potential to be purchased by a misinformed idiot, thats just the way of the pet trade.(i'm not condoning it, I think the pet trade has a lot to answer for, but currently in the UK, that's how things stand) There is certainly a need for greater legislation and , perhaps more importantly, a need for the shops selling these animals to actually be able to inform prospective owners of husbandry needs, but I fear that this is still some way off. There are definately suppliers out there that do provide decent advice and care about where their animals are going but unfortunately there are just as many that do not. Equally unfortunately, this applies just as much to domestic pets as it does to exotics - I was recently informed at a local pet shop that a rat and a dwarf hamster could coexist quite happily in a 'rotastak' style hamster cage. I think zoos could probably help matters by including unsuitability as pets into some of their talks and i'm also hopeful that the price tag attached to some of these exotics will put off all but the most determined of buyers but time will tell. Will be interesting to see if the newly released Disney film "G Force" will lead to a surge in guinea pig sales and whether this will cause similar outcry to the meerkat.
