The Exotic Pet Trade Harms Animals and Humans. The European Union Is Studying a Potential Solution
EU legislators are considering a form of regulation that could protect many species from unsafe exploitation — if it’s done right.
The post The Exotic Pet Trade Harms Animals and Humans. The European Union Is Studying a Potential Solution appeared first on The Revelator.
By the time a sugar glider named Mango entered an animal sanctuary in the Netherlands in 2023, life as a pet had taken a terrible toll. Mango lost both his brothers and his right eye due to health issues, despite being kept by a veterinarian for seven years.
These days, Europeans keep tens of millions of exotic pets — as do people in other countries around the world. Although beloved by their owners, experts say most of these animals, like Mango, do not adapt well to life in captivity and often face health problems and premature death as a result of this legal trade.
Mango the sugar glider. Courtesy Animal Advocacy and Protection
Globally, the business involves an estimated 13,000 species, many unsuited to being companion animals, says Michèle Hamers, EU policy officer at the nonprofit Animal Advocacy and Protection. The organization runs the sanctuary where 9-year-old Mango lived — alongside fellow sugar gliders Radagast, Didache, Duizeltje, and Sushi — until his sudden death on July 21, likely from a hematoma.
“Something needs to change,” says Hamers.
For her organization, that change would involve the introduction of an EU-wide “positive list” for exotic pets — a limited inventory of approved pet species suited to captivity.
They’re not the only ones asking for this. In recent years, momentum has grown toward making this a reality.
The Pet Trade in Europe
Sugar gliders are marsupials native to Australia, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea named for their ability to “glide” through the air between trees on fleshy membranes connecting their front and back legs. Their arboreal, nocturnal lifestyles are among the traits that make them unsuitable for living in a cage in someone’s house, Animal Advocacy and Protection says.
By their very nature of being wild, many other species don’t do well in captivity. As a result, the nonprofit’s rescue centers in the Netherlands and Spain take in as many exotic pets as they can. It’s never enough: they typically have a waiting list in the hundreds.
Hamers says relinquished or seized animals typically arrive with behavioral and physical problems, including bone malformations, malnutrition, and stress-related issues like self-mutilation.
An exotic bird market in Paris, which was shuttered in 2021. Photo: Elekes Andor via Wikimedia Commons
To tackle the root cause of the situation, the organization and other concerned NGOs are pushing for EU-wide legislative change, preferably a “preventative approach” to regulating the trade. Hamers says this would establish a selective list of animals who can be kept, with all others banned by default.
This type of system is known as positive, reverse, or whitelisting.
Only animals who “can thrive in captivity and are safe to be kept” should make the cut, explains Hamers.
Presently, the EU has no regulation designed to address the pet trade, although the market sometimes falls under laws concerning animal health, “invasive alien” species, and trade in threatened wildlife. Mostly, though, member states decide their own rules on exotic pets, which can vary greatly from country to country.
Some EU nations don’t regulate the exotic pet trade at all, while others use a negative list system, meaning they create lists of banned species. The remaining member states — 12 out of 27 — have some form of positive list in place or the legal basis to develop them, says Hamers.
In recent years European lawmakers have signaled support for an EU-wide positive list through varied resolutions and action plans. As a result the European Commission, which is the bloc’s executive body, commissioned a study on its feasibility in late 2023. The results are due later this year.
On June 19, as part of a proposed regulation on the trade in pet cats and dogs, the European Parliament also voted in favor of establishing an EU-wide positive list for exotic pets, providing that the feasibility study shows the measure to be valuable and legally possible.
One Trade, Many Problems
In the proposed regulation, EU lawmakers warn that “the absence of a common Union framework” leads to “inconsistencies, gaps in enforcement, confusion for consumers and, often, to serious animal welfare consequences for species that are unsuitable to be kept as pets, as well as risks to biodiversity, human health and safety and nature conservation.”
This statement illustrates why support for a positive list is gaining steam: the exotic pet trade is associated with several problems, not solely animal welfare.
For Animal Advocacy and Protection, the welfare of kept animals is a priority. Whether captivity can meet animals’ physical and psychological needs should be the main criteria for considering who gets on the list, says Hamers.
But, she adds, the criteria should include other factors, such as risks to biodiversity and public health and safety.
A 2021 report by nonprofits Born Free and the RSPCA highlighted the potential risks exotic pets pose to public health. They include injuries and transmission of zoonotic pathogens: diseases like Covid-19 that can be passed between humans and other animals.
A dyeing poison dart frog, a popular species in the pet trade. Photo: Michael Hoefner/Wikimedia Commons
More than 85% of live animals traded globally are not native to the countries importing them, according to a 2023 analysis, which can pose a risk to environmental health. Hundreds of imported species have ended up being released into the wild, sometimes with dire consequences for native wildlife. For instance, scientists have implicated the trade in live amphibians for pets and meat in the global spread of the disease chytridiomycosis, which is linked to widespread amphibian population declines and 90 documented extinctions.
On the flip side, trade can pose a threat to exploited species themselves. Scientists have calculated that 25% of the over 800 amphibian species traded as pets are threatened. They said further regulation and other measures are “urgently needed to slow the decline of populations and loss of species as a consequence of unsustainable, and largely unmonitored trade in wildlife.”
Likewise, the industry is notorious for scooping up newly described species, often ones with limited ranges, to support collectors’ voracious desire for novelty. Positive lists could help to nip this unscrupulous inclination in the bud, because commerce in such species would be banned by default.
Exotic pets are both sourced from the wild and bred in captivity. Breeding operations can relieve pressure on wild populations. But they can also be associated with illicit activity, such as the laundering of wild-caught animals into the captive-bred trade.
In 2019, Belgium’s federal body for health, food chain safety, and environment, pointed to further links between captive breeding and illegality in a factsheet about the live amphibian trade. It stated, “illegal specimens are assumed to be the founding stock for many captive specimens, including within the European Union.”
Illegal trade is a significant issue in the exotic pet business. A report by Traffic highlighted that 28% of all animals seized by EU countries in 2023 were likely destined to be pets, amounting to some 3,500 individuals.
The lack of uniform regulation across the EU is a “massive problem” in this regard, says Hamers. Market fragmentation in a free trade bloc creates a ripe environment for illegal trade, she explains, because people can purchase animals banned in their own country from other EU states with relative ease.
The United States has the same issue. In a 2023 paper, researchers noted that state and local regulations govern much of the trade, despite federal rules having some bearing on it, such as the Lacey Act’s prohibitions on the importation of certain “injurious” species.
Differing and incomplete rules across states, alongside lackluster penalties for wrongdoing, have “facilitated continued possession of exotic pets in states where these animals are banned,” the researchers warned. They concluded the U.S. would benefit from a nationwide positive list system, too.
Making Positive Lists Meaningful
Even with captive breeding, many exotic pets being traded across the EU and the U.S. originated from countries elsewhere, says Peter Lanius, director of the Australian nonprofit Nature Needs More.
Lanius’ organization released a report in June outlining how a global positive list for exotic pets could be introduced by the global wildlife trade treaty body, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.
Alongside yardsticks like considering species’ welfare needs and mortality rates in captivity, it argues that a determining factor should include whether trade is easy to monitor.
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This ties to the report’s broader theme: the importance of establishing a robust regulatory architecture around positive lists, which the authors say is generally lacking even for the few that already exist. Pet industry advocates have described existing lists in European countries and elsewhere as “unenforceable,” the report notes.
“If you stop at the point where you just list what can be traded, but there’s no infrastructure… it’s symbolic, not practical,” insists Lynn Johnson, Nature Needs More’s founder and CEO.
Positive lists must be accompanied by “dedicated monitoring and enforcement capacity,” according to the report. Nature Needs More also calls for businesses to be registered, licensed, and required to provide end-to-end traceability for the animals they trade.
Owners should be required to register exotic pets too, the report says, with the veterinary profession engaged in maintaining care standards.
Other outlined provisions include creating a listing authority to determine and perpetually review the positive list, as well as interventions to reduce consumer demand for banned species. The organization also calls for legislation to compel social media companies to police commerce on their sites by making them liable for traded animals.
The organization says financing these provisions should come from a business levy on traders.
None of these ideas are revolutionary, the nonprofit stresses. Nations have imposed similar regulatory measures on the pharmaceutical and chemical industries. But the model would be a massive step for the wildlife trade, which typically lacks adequate monitoring and enforcement.
A Trivial Trade in Living Beings
This January the European Pet Organization — which bills itself as “the voice of the pet sector at European level” — released a position statement on positive lists. In contrast to ornamental fish trade veteran Tim Haywood, who told The Revelator last year that the number of species in the pet fish trade must shrink, the pet organization rejected the idea of “restrictive measures” such as positive lists.
The group suggested poor welfare and illegality in the trade are limited and could be dealt with through improved enforcement of existing legislation and education of consumers. It also argued that restricting petkeeping through positive lists wouldn’t stop determined owners from buying forbidden exotic animals.
However, a Finnish study found that many hobbyists are put off from buying exotic pets when the animals are subject to trade restrictions.
Hamers has further reason to doubt that a positive list system will lead to significant rises in illegal petkeeping. The trade is “hyper-commercialized,” she explains, and “many purchases are done on the whim,” often driven by popular culture trends like movies or social media.
“Once species aren’t for sale anymore through common channels, the possibility to buy an animal on an impulse also disappears,” says Hamers.
For Nature Needs More, the often-trivial nature of modern-day pet purchasing makes positive listing so necessary. Although the keeping of exotic pets has occurred for centuries, substantially more people can casually engage it now due to having the money, time, and access to animals in “our globalized, industrial society,” its report says.
“When a trade in living beings is allowed to function by the rules of the throw-away consumer society, then we have a serious problem,” the organization warns.
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Previously in The Revelator:
Time to Confront the Aquarium Trade’s ‘Gray Areas’
The post The Exotic Pet Trade Harms Animals and Humans. The European Union Is Studying a Potential Solution appeared first on The Revelator.
