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Posted by desiree on October 31, 2002 at 09:57:34:
Pet rescuers busier with glut of exotic pets
By JOAN LOWY
October 30, 2002
Two years ago, Mary Lawson quit her job as a legal secretary in Bellevue, Wash., to rescue guinea pigs from animal shelters before they could be put down. Now she runs a guinea pig adoption service, Cavy Companions, from her home, digging into her own pocket to cover costs.
In 1993, Amanda Lollar was walking down the street in Mineral Wells, Texas, when she found an injured bat on the sidewalk. She took the bat home and nursed it back to health. Eventually, she sold her family furniture business and founded Bat World, which runs one of the world's largest private bat sanctuaries.
A passion for reptiles led Dolly Ellerbrock and her husband, Herb, who is the Komodo dragon keeper at the Pittsburgh Zoo, to found the Pittsburgh Herpetological Society 10 years ago as a way to commune with other snake and lizard buffs. The society fields 2,000 calls a year about reptiles that need rescuing or from owners who no longer want their pets, including 500 calls about iguanas alone.
Over the past decade, the world of animal rescue has become a lot more than dogs, cats and bunnies. Pick any kind of animal and somebody is trying to rescue it. There are rat rescuers and deer rescuers, shelters for tigers and tortoises. There are societies for the protection of ferrets and sanctuaries for homeless pot-bellied pigs.
Animal lovers take homeless animals of all kinds from one part of the country to another where they can connect up with either potential adopters or a sanctuary. They call the transportation "underground railroads."
Animal sanctuaries "are flourishing like mushrooms after the rain," said Martine Colette, president of Wildlife Waystation, a sanctuary near Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Mountains. "Every time I look there is another sanctuary."
Still, the demand is so great that nearly every sanctuary is full almost as soon as it opens and many go bankrupt after taking in more animals than they can afford to support.
One reason for the growth in the diversity of animal rescue is that the Internet has enabled rescuers interested in even the most obscure species to easily find like-minded people anywhere in the world and network with them. Until the early 1990s, rescuers had to rely on clubs, flyers, magazine ads and word-of-mouth.
When Lollar first started rescuing bats a decade ago, she went to her local library to research their nutritional and medicals needs, but found little information. Today, bat rehabilitators can find pretty much anything they need to know through Bat World's Web site, www.batworld.org, or by asking questions on the "batline," a listserv of 200 rehabilitators around the world.
Virtually every rescue group, including traditional animal shelters, has a Web site that connects potential adopters with homeless animals. One of the largest, www.petfinder.com, which is underwritten by the pet food industry, features more than 93,000 animals at 3,300 shelters and rescue groups in the United States and Canada at any one time. Most of the animals are dogs and cats, but the variety of species is growing.
Conversely, the Internet has also facilitated a soaring trade in exotic animals. More than 1,000 Internet sites offer to sell, give care advice and provide chat rooms where exotic pet buyers and sellers can haggle over a price. The international trade in exotic animals is second only to drugs and weapons, according to the Humane Society of the United States.
All too often Americans' fickle love affair with the exotic pet of the moment has led to abandonment and abuse as pet owners discover that their pet is not so easy to care for and even more difficult to unload.
In the 1980s, Vietnamese potbellied pigs and large parrots like cockatoos and macaws were the craze. Thanks to captive breeding, there is now a huge surplus of both pigs and parrots, many of which are increasingly being handed off to shelters or simply abandoned.
Reptiles are the current hot ticket animal in pet shops and swap meets and on the Internet. Reptile rescuers and shelters say they are inundated with iguanas, which are imported from Central and South America.
Green iguanas, the most popular iguana species in the pet trade, may be only six to eight inches long during their first year of life, but a healthy iguana typically grows up to five to six feet long by the time it's seven years old - and they can have nasty dispositions. Many iguana owners ultimately decide a six-foot lizard is more trouble than it's worth.
Also trendy are pygmy African hedgehogs and sugar gliders, an Australian marsupial that looks similar to a flying squirrel. Both part of a current fad for "pocket pets."
Other growth pets are prairie dogs, which are almost always obtained from the wild, often by being sucked out of their burrows using giant vacuum cleaners. Many of the captured prairie dogs are exported to Japan.
There are probably more tigers in backyards in the United States - an estimated 5,000 to 10,000, not including zoos and professional associations - than there are left in the wild, said Richard Farinato of the humane society.
"We don't even have a clear idea on numbers of lions because no one pays any attention to it," Farinato said. "There is no one single reporting authority that people have to go to. Most states still are not regulating or licensing these kinds of animals. They are just out there. It's not until some little kid gets killed that the community gets up in arms about it."
Over the past three years, the Houston Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has taken in 42 big cats, mostly lions and tigers. On two occasions, pet owners have walked blithely into the society's shelter with cougars they wanted to unload.
"Beginning about six years ago, it was as if somebody unleashed the flood gate for big cats," said Patricia Mercer, executive director of the Houston SPCA.
Twelve states - Alaska, California, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont and Wyoming - ban the private possession of exotic animals, usually large cats, wolves, bears, primates and dangerous reptiles. Those laws often don't apply to commercial breeders.
Marshall Meyers, executive vice president of the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council, said the industry has a responsibility to make sure pet buyers have the information they need to properly care for their pet, but after that the onus is on the pet owner.
"There are some people who are not responsible, who do not take care of (pets) responsibly, and they end up in rescue facilities and shelters," Meyers said.
Animal rescue groups greatly exaggerate the number of pet animals, particular exotic animals, that need rescuing, Meyers said. "We just don't see this around the country as an issue," he said.
However, increasing numbers of pet stores are now willing to take back pets that pet buyers no longer want or can no longer keep, sometimes even years later, Meyers said. The council is currently conducting a survey of its members to gauge the extent of the trend, he said.
On the Net: The Humane Society of the United States - www.hsus.org
Joan Lowy is a reporter for Scripps Howard News Service. E-mail LowyJ(at)shns.com
