Essay on Keeping Exotic Animals

People may think that keeping exotic animals as their pets is fun. However, that may lead to danger to human, animals, and even the environment.

Firstly, there will be danger to human if they keep those exotic animals as their pets improperly. Some big and powerful animals, such as tigers and lions, are kept as pets. They have sharp teeth and able to impose attack and serious injury or even death. It will be very risky for both the owners and bystanders if this kind of dangerous wild animal is not being trained.^[1] Besides, even some smaller animals can impose severe bites and scratches, like cat can scratch while scorpion or snake may bite. In the world, there are numbers of animals, such as spider and snake, that transmit deadly venoms and able to kill us. Don’t think that small animal like hamster is small and cute, so that they do not have the ability to attack. However, the spit of hamster contain something that will lead to sensitive respond. There is the case that a little girl died after bitten by a hamster in Hong Kong. Also, some animals may have diseases that can be transferred to human beings, like bird flu or rabies that can be found on a lot of animals like dogs, skunks, raccoons and etc.

Secondly, there will be danger to animals too if human keep those exotic animals as pets without understanding them. There maybe insufficient information available on caring for such animals, so keeper doesn’t even know how to take care of the pets. Also, proper housing may be difficult or expensive to provide. For example, some animals live in forest, but it is difficult to build a forest inside a house, or even the house is big enough to build the forest, the cost will be very high too. Moreover, some animals live in specific environment, such as specific temperature or amount of sunlight, which is difficult to provide by the keeper. Take hedgehog as an example, some people keep hedgehog in Hong Kong, but Hong Kong is a city with high humidity level that will make them easy to get disease on skin. Furthermore, feeding the correct diet for those animals may be difficult or impossible, since the diet they need may not be easy to find in our daily life. Since it maybe difficult to provide appropriate environmental conditions, housing and diet for an exotic animal due to different reasons, those animals maybe easier get disease or die.^[2] Apart from the difficulty on raising them, some human diseases can be dangerous for certain animals too, like streptococcal throat can cause deadly effect.