Nov 3, 1998
Pet shop will take exotic animals off sales list

Nicolas Read

No one wants stores to be put out of business, but the mortality rate for exotic animals in captivity is overwhelming.

Last week, as one Lower Mainland council debated the future of pet shops in B.C., one of the province's largest pet-supply retailers helped create it.

Last Wednesday, Petcetera, which operates stores in Vancouver and Coquitlam, and plans to open more in Victoria, Kelowna, Richmond, Kamloops and Calgary, announced that as of Feb 1, it will no longer sell exotic animals. No reptiles, no amphibians, no hedgehogs an dno sugargliders (a kind of flying squirrel). Only fish and domestically bred birds.

Last year, Petcetera, which has an agreement with the SPCA to promote the adoption of SPCA dogs and cats in its stores, announced a limited cessation of exotic-animal sales. But it continued to carry such creaturees as frogs, toads, salamanders and newts.

As of next Februarty, however, it won't. Company president and CEO Dan Urbani said Petcetera has decided to respond to public conerns and stop all sales of animals that can not be looked after properly by casual customers. that means all exotic animals.

It will mean a reduction in Petcetera business, he said, but it was what the public wanted. "I hope other pet retailers will follow our lead" he added.

That certainly is the idea behind a proposal put forward by the City of North Vancouver to forbid the further sale of reptiles and amphibians in city pet shops. If passed, the bylaw would be the first of its kind in the Lower Mainland.

But its future looks uncertain. Pet store owner Winston Wing told a sympathetic council last Monday that he has a good rapport with members of the community who buy exotic animals from him and that banning the trade might mean that he would have to close his store.

Certainly no one wants to see anyone put out of business, but the trade in exotic animals is one that needs to be stopped. It's no exaggeration to say that for every wild-caught exotic animal that survives long enough to be sold in a store, one hundred have died at the point of capture and in transport.

Furthermore, only a few people know how to look after such animals properly outside the wild, so the mortality rate even for captive-bred exotic animals is overwhelming. Said North Vancouver Moses Milstein, who spoke in favour of the ban: "We don't know what these animals need to survive in captivity. The average child can't do it on his own."

The Rainforest Reptile Refuge in Surrey is full of animals discarded by people who couldn't cope with them anymore-so many that refuge owners Clarence and Christine Schramm can't accept any more. It means they have no choice but to refuse unwanted snakes, lizards, frogs and toads almost every day of the week.

Even so, North Van Councillor Bob Fearnley announced he was against the bylaw, describing it as "too extreme".

"All along, I've asked myself: why are we trying to drive these people out of business?" Fearnley said.

Again, no one wants to drive anyone out of business, but if Petcetera can ammend its trade to reflect a more humane approach to selling animals, surely other pet retailers can too.

It's about saving tens of thousands of animals' lives.

It's that simple, and yes, that extreme.