Exotic pets?

I like animals. I have two dogs, a cat and a yard full of chickens. I understand the appeal of keeping exotic animals as pets, whether its a giant snake or a money swinging from the rafters of your house. However, increasingly the animals used as exotic pets are becoming endangered or threatened in their own natural habitats because of illegal poaching fueled by the money involved in the buying and selling of exotic animals.

Read more about Parrot Poaching in Jamaica here.

Poaching can devastate entire ecosystems by removing or dramatically reducing the populations of key species from the food chain. Furthermore, it can actually have the opposite effect as people grow tired of caring for their exotic pets and release them into the wild in parts of the world where they are not native. These exotic pets, if the environment is suitable, can multiply and become a nuisance invasive species in thes areas.

One example of this is the growing population of wild Burmese pythons living in the Florida Everglades says National Geographic. These snaes are imported into the United States by the hundreds of thousands. Often, they grow too large for their owners to handle safely and are released or they may escape.

Burmese pythons are now sharing space at the top of the Everglades food chain with the alligator. In some cases, pythons are even killing alligators. These are very big, and very mean snakes. They also feed on birds and bird eggs putting many of the rare bird species in the everglades at risk from this newly introduced, but rapidly multiplying predator.

While it's easy to see the havoc that top predators can do when introduced to a new ecosystem, even seemingly harmless animals can have unintended consequences and be very harmful to local species when wrecklessly introduced.

If you want to see and learn about these exotic animals, visit a local zoo that aids in preserving rare species. During a recent trip to the York Zoo in Maine, I too some photos of the capybara. Click here to view photos that I took of the capybara, the world's largest rodent which is native to South and Central America. Upon retunring home, I was surprised to discover that even this animal is now being kept as pets in the United States.