Exotic pet trading and keeping: Proposing a model government consultation and advisory protocol

Abstract

Exotic pet trading and keeping raises many concerns regarding animal welfare, species conservation, ecological alteration, invasive species, public health and safety, and other issues. Despite these concerns, the UK Government assigns greater consultation importance to exotic pet trading and keeping stakeholders than to parties that seek to remedy relevant problems, or to independent experts. To help ameliorate the current situation, we propose a model government advisory protocol in which consultation weight is assigned first to independent scientific parties; secondly to animal welfare parties; and thirdly to exotic pet trading and keeping parties. Relatedly, we present two case studies as illustrative examples, that: A. examine UK government and other national approaches to stakeholder consultations; and B. compare differences in scale between stakeholders for the exotic pet trade and hobby, animal welfare, and independent expert sectors based on respective numbers of employees, registered supporters, and social media followers. We conclude that current UK and some other protocols are wrongly skewed towards exotic pet trading and keeping practices, and may be causally-related to the long-standing and growing concerns regarding problematic issues, and that relevant animal welfare parties greatly outweigh exotic pet trading and keeping parties, which further suggests that consultation bias towards the exotic pet trading and keeping sector is disproportionate.