- Question
- Should exotic animals be pets?
- Position1 of 2›
- No, exotic animals should not be pets
Owning exotic or wild animals is regulated by complicated and overlapping federal, state, and local laws. They typically vary depending on the community and type of animal. These laws are in place to protect the safety of the animals as well as the people involved.
The argument
Proponents of this position argue that the law has already reached a settled judgement about keeping exotic animals, and that the judgement deserves respect. Nearly every country is party to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, an agreement to protect the safety of animals and plants moving in international trade. CITES is not a marginal instrument adopted by a handful of states; its near-universal membership means the international community has collectively accepted that trade in these animals is a matter requiring control rather than an ordinary commercial activity left to buyers and sellers. Domestic law extends the same logic to private ownership. Outright bans are rare, but many places require a prospective owner to obtain a licence, or to undergo training, before the animal can be purchased. The point of such a requirement is that competence with an exotic animal cannot be assumed: the licensing step exists because the default expectation is that an ordinary household is not equipped to meet the animal's needs. Where these restrictions are dense enough, their practical effect approaches prohibition, and in some areas it is almost impossible to keep an exotic animal as a pet at all. On this view the regulations are evidence as well as constraint. They were created to ensure that exotic animals are not abused by private owners, which means that legislators, acting on experience of what private ownership has actually produced, concluded that the risk of abuse was serious enough to warrant interfering in what people may keep in their own homes. Someone who wants an exotic pet is therefore not merely facing paperwork; they are proposing to do something that the law has deliberately made difficult, for reasons about the animal's welfare that the law states openly. Exotic animals should not be pets.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Even though laws have made it more challenging to own exotic animals as pets, it is still possible to do so. Different regions have varying exotic animal laws, but nearly all species are able to be pets in some parts of the world. Regardless of the creation of CITES to regulate the exotic animal trade, thousands are traded or sold on the black market every year.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P3] Just because they are illegal in some areas does not mean they should not be pets.