A study by Born Free USA has found how easy it is to buy an exotic animal online in the US. One Green Planet spent months looking into the ease of buying exotic animals online and "they found more than 1,800 advertisements for wild animals, including
various primates, exotic cats, raccoons, kinkajous, badgers, turtles, rodents, skunks, sloths, frogs, and other species."What's more is that in 90% of those posts, there was no instruction given on how to care for the animal being sold. Plus, not even 2% of sellers asked anything about buyers. Meaning that it's easy to buy animals that should never be owned by humans without even learning how to care for them properly.
This is certainly leading to gross mistreatment of exotic animals. People could be buying animals purely to exploit or torture them and no one is checking up on it.
Owning a wild animal is a big undertaking. These are not domesticated animals that know how to live with humans. Many bite or scratch and can transmit diseases. None of this information is shared when the selling of animals happens online.
Some of the time wild animals are mutilated to make them easier to manage. Sellers will file down their teeth, or remove their nails entirely.This kind of buying and selling on the internet must be regulated to protect these species from irresponsible breeding, ownership and animal abuse.
Please sign to tell Congress that they need to crack down on the sale of exotic animals. 