Imagine you are a young sloth. You are doing your thing in the forest, knowing that you were straying a bit close to the human homes nearby. All of a sudden, you feel arms curl around you and lift you up. You are too slow to do anything. The human takes you home and cares for you. You stay there for several years, and then they let you back out into the forest. You can’t remember how to hunt and you don’t know where anything is. After not finding any resources to live on, you die, parched and hungry. This is why exotic, wild animals shouldn’t be kept as pets. This is because they are less likely to reproduce if they are kept captive, they are harder to take care of than normal house pets, and domestication of any species is difficult to achieve.
If a species is endangered, it could be fatal to their species if they are taken in as pets. Endangered animals, such as tigers, are usually exotic, and held as pets. An estimated 5,000 tigers are pets, and if they are pets, they are less likely to reproduce. This can cause the species to go extinct, unless you somehow found a way to get two tigers, and for them to reproduce. We could really cause a lot of endangered species to go extinct. That would mess with the whole food chain, which would mess with other species as well.
Exotic animals are much harder to take care of than normal house pets that have grown accustomed to being tamed. House pets like dogs are able to live in a human’s house without being traumatized, and is okay with eating the food that we give them. We take care of them the way we think they should be treated, and it works. But exotic animals are different. They were wild very recently, and they aren’t accustomed to a human’s way of taking care of them. They require much different care, care that would be near impossible to provide. If we don’t give them all the required care, they could do a many number of things. They could get angry and attack us, they might run away, and they probably would get sick.
Domestication of a species is very hard to achieve, which we usually overlook since we have domesticated so many already. We have horses, birds, dogs, cats, fish, frogs, toads, rabbits… the list goes on. But if we think about it, a long time ago, those were wild animals. But we don’t think about it, because it takes centuries to domesticate a species. Many of the exotic animals we have for pets today are endangered, like tigers. We don’t have the time to domesticate them, because they’ll go extinct before we do! That would mess up the entire food chain, which could leave us to starve as well. The world would be left, dirty and empty, with no one to take care of it or live on it.
Exotic animals should not be kept as pets, because they are less likely to reproduce if they’re kept captive, they are harder to take care of than normal house pets, and domestication of any species is very difficult to achieve. All of these reasons together create a perfect defense from certain species going extinct. We could save many animals by saving even one species from extinction. We can save them by letting the animals stay in their wild habitats.
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