KAMLOOPS – THE DAILY NEWS - March 20,2004-"Pet store closure sends exotic pets to SPCA for care

By MICHELLE YOUNG
Daily News Reporter

A Kamloops exotic pet store that shut down this week handed 51 animals over to the SPCA including cockroaches, snakes and lizards.

Kamloops SPCA manager Jennifer Gore said Friday the reptiles were being shipped to a rescue agency in the Lower Mainland that specialized in those creatures.

Some of the animals were in bad shape and one lizard died within a few hours of being taken in, she said.

"We offered to take whatever animals were left," said Gore.

Kamloops Jungle Pet had been monitored by the SPCA for a while due to a number of complaints about the conditions of the animals in the store, she said.

The shop was sold in early March to new owners. They sent out a press release Friday stating they were closing the store permanently and that they had found some dead and sick animals in the shop when they took it over.

Among the creatures taken by the SPCA were 20 rats, a pregnant chinchilla, hamsters, a ball python, an albino king snake, a baby corn snake that requires hand feeding, several lizards and geckos, a bearded dragon, two large red-eared slider turtles and some Madagascar hissing cockroaches.

A thin mother cat and four two-week old kittens were also handed over. They are in an SPCA foster home.

Gore said the store’s new owners have been co-operative.

The shelter has had people bring in exotic animals often because the creatures live longer than expected. Gore noted a young red-eared slider turtle in the front entry was left by someone who didn’t realize its life span is 15 to 20 years.

Red-eared sliders originate from warm-climate countries, but there are 300,000 in the wild in B.C. as a result of owners turning them loose in the ecosystem, she said.

The B.C. SPCA has a policy against the trade of keeping of exotic or wild animals for several reasons, including disease risks to people and other animals, they have special needs, and are easily stressed, escapes and abandonment are common, and they experience suffering and high death rates while being captured and transported.

"The conditions many of them are transported in are horrendous," she said.

Kelowna recently passed a bylaw banning the sale of trade of exotic animals within its city limits.

City Coun. Terry Lake said council should look at sale and ownership of exotic pets. There isn’t a lot of expertise in terms of the animals’ care either in the home or even on the veterinary side, he said.

Plus, if exotics escape, they can be harmful to people or other animals or even the environment, as in the case of the red-eared slider turtles.

"So from a humane point of view and safety point of view it’s a concern of mine," he said,

"What we’re seeing at Jungle Pet is exactly the concern I have as a city councillor and a veterinarian."

Lake has formed a loose committee to look into exotic animal ban bylaws, but it hasn’t met yet. He said if such a bylaw was adopted, it would be enforced on a complaint basis.

"When you have a bylaw, it serves as a piece of education for people," he said.

Paul Springate at the Rainforest Reptile Refuge in Surrey said most people buying an exotic animal don’t know anything about it. And often the information they get at the store is wrong.

"They buy it as a novelty," he said. "It usually wears off. Most of our animals come to us in their first year or two of life."

Springate said lizards and geckos can live at least 15 or 20 years, snakes and iguanas 20 - to 30 years.

"If you’re buying an exotic, chances are you’re paying the poacher when you buy it," he said. "It’s cruelty to animals to have reptiles as pets. … Anything that you have to keep in a cage does not make a suitable pet."