The Case Against Owning Small Pets

I grew up in the Maryland suburbs and spent much of my childhood in the woods. I would turn over rocks to find shiny centipedes and watch small schools of fish glide through the creek as box turtles sunbathed on the banks. A squirrel’s frenzied search for a nut would capture my full attention. 

I liked these critters so much that I wanted animals around all the time. So I asked my parents to take me to the pet store — a place where many small animals, for a small price, could be mine.

Fish were my first passion, and I can still picture the aquarium store I frequented: rows of tanks holding tropical fish of unknown provenance, their lives just a couple dollars apiece. I bought a few with my allowance, and despite closely following the feeding and water quality instructions, the fish would inevitably die a few weeks or months later, and I would reliably return to the aquarium store to buy a few more. 

Eventually, I moved on from fish and bought two hamsters, which was fun — until one ate the other. Hamsters are highly solitary, it turns out, and can turn cannibalistic when confined together; no pet store employee warned me.

When the other one died, I gave up on small pets, and resigned myself to observing animals in the woods. (I tried — and failed — to win the affection of our family cat, Clover, who only ever really liked my dad.)

My experience was hardly unique. Each year, American households buy tens of millions of small animals to keep as pets — mostly fish, but also gerbils, lizards, birds, snakes, frogs, turtles, and more. Many are bred in the US, but an estimated 90 million individuals are imported annually, one-third of whom are taken from the wild. 

While many people have probably experienced something like I did, there’s still a general sense that small pets are good — compared to cats and dogs, they take up less space, they’re ostensibly easier for kids to care for, and even if they’re kept in confinement, surely their lives are better than they would be in the wild. Right?

But in recent years, I’ve come to believe that pet ownership is much more ethically fraught than I once did, and more than most would assume. I say this as a pet owner myself. Like so many people, my partner and I adopted a dog, Evvie, early in the Covid-19 pandemic. But as the pandemic subsided, she spent more time alone, even beyond the hours we worked on our laptops and tended to the rest of our lives. 

That meant less time to do her favorite things — walk around the neighborhood, run in the woods, play tug of war, and meet new people — and more time bored on the couch.

It compelled me to look more closely at the ethics of pet keeping, and eventually, I outlined those concerns in a story provocatively titled “The case against pet ownership.” I argued that beneath the warm and fuzzy narrative of a life with pets — companionship, love, and mutual affection — lies a darker side. 

There are the unambiguous cruelties, like ​​physical abuse, hoarding, puppy mills, and dog fighting. Then there are the cruelties that have long been socially acceptable but are falling out of favor, like declawing and ear cropping. But there’s also more casual neglect and harm that often goes unseen and unspoken: aversive training, prolonged crating, monotonous diets, lack of exercise and agency, and the ensuing boredom of captivity. 

The article focused on dogs and cats, which make up the slight majority of the US pet population, but they’re just part of the story. Around 40 percent of America’s pets are small, largely wild or “exotic” animals — fish, birds, small mammals, amphibians, and reptiles — and they likely suffer far more than our canine and feline companions. 

These animals might seem logically poised for captivity, given their typically smaller sizes and seemingly stoic dispositions. But as we learn more about their inner lives and consider the behaviors they evolved to have in the wild, the serious problems with this arrangement quickly emerge. 

Think of the tropical bird caged in a city apartment, unable to fly; the Australian bearded dragon languishing in a suburban American basement under a heat lamp; the ball python native to Central and Western Africa with a diverse diet and impressive hunting finesse subsisting off one frozen-thawed rat every other week; or the countless species of fish whose miles-wide ranges in the wild are shrunk down to a couple of feet in a tank.

“I think that the welfare of these animals is worse than anybody else’s,” Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist and author of several books on the ethics of pet keeping, told me. Yet pet stores, who often market these animals as starter pets for children, “really capitalize on small animals…that’s where they make a lot of money.”

Other species have found strong markets in dedicated communities of adult hobbyists who share pictures and trade tips on Reddit, Facebook groups, and other forums. Given their exotic looks, the rise of shortform video content — via TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram Reels — has driven even more interest in breeding and owning them. 

Even shrimp, cockroaches, giant snails, and rare isopods are kept as pets now. 

I have no doubt that many of the millions of Americans who keep these animals as pets love them and go the extra mile to give them as good of a life as they can. Indeed, companionship, love, and company is a top motivator to get a small pet, according to a large survey on pet ownership. But the same survey also shows that the top motivator to acquire small pets is “fun to watch/have in household.”

It all suggests that these living arrangements might be much more about us and what we want than what animals need.

“People are happy because they have animal companions,” Pierce has written. “Animals are happy because … well, we don’t ever really ask this question. If we did, we might not like the answer.”

After working with exotic pets as a veterinarian in New York City for nearly 20 years, Alix Wilson told me she’s “become a firm, strong believer that most of these animals shouldn’t be pets.”

And long before they reach our homes, many of these animals are bred in neglectful conditions. A new investigation into bird breeding operations for example, shared exclusively with Vox, reveals the cruelty behind the supply of some of these pets.

Given the complexities of these animals’ needs in the wild, and the inability for us to give them comparable lives in captivity, to some veterinarians, animal behaviorists, and ethicists, our massive small pet population represents a quiet, invisible crisis of animal suffering. 

What does a fish, lizard, bird, or hamster need?

As a young boy in 1970s North London, Clifford Warwick developed a “stamp collector mentality” when it came to animals. 

“I wanted as many different species as possible,” Warwick told me — especially reptiles and amphibians. But eventually he felt there was something wrong with his hobby because “these animals would spend so much time…trying to get out of their enclosures, and although I wasn’t necessarily the smartest kid in the world, I was able to work out if something wants to get out, there’s something wrong.”

When he was 14, Warwick traveled to Central and South America to see animals in the wild, and he was struck at just how hard it was to find them. The amount of space available to animals in their natural environments compared to how little space his pets had in London caused a sudden change of heart: When he got home, he gave away or sold off all of them.

He went on to earn degrees in biology, animal behavior, and medical science, and has published a wide-ranging collection of academic papers, articles, and books on the welfare of exotic pets. One thing he said to me in our conversation sums up his viewpoint: “Just because you can keep an animal captive doesn’t mean you should.”

It’s difficult to make sweeping generalizations about the welfare harms of keeping small animals as pets, because this group is composed of wildly different phylogenetic classes and hundreds of species, each with distinct behaviors and needs that have evolved to survive in a diversity of ecosystems. For example, think of how some of the most popular pet species live in the wild: 

• Budgerigars, often called parakeets, are a type of parrot native to Australia. They’re highly social and nomadic, traveling great distances in large flocks in search of food.
• The Blue tang fish originates from the Indo-Pacific ocean region. They can travel miles in a day, often swim with large schools of fellow Blue tangs, and spend their days cleaning algae from coral reefs.
• Leopard geckos are native to desert and grassland regions in the Middle East and South Asia, where they hunt for insects at night — they’re nocturnal — and burrow in the daytime. They’ve also been found to live in colonies.
• Golden hamsters, one of the most common pet rodents, are native to the Aleppinian plateau in Syria, and have incredibly sensitive hearing. They travel up to eight miles in the nighttime to gather food, which they take back to their burrows where they spend most of the day. 

Despite the vast range of wild lives these animals have evolved to have, what most clearly unifies the harm of keeping all of them as pets, according to Warwick and others, is the fact that all of them will be confined in cages for nearly their entire lives.

“Control over the environment is something that all animals, including humans, need in order not to be stressed — it’s a fundamental,” Warwick told me. “The way we punish people is to take away their control, i.e. we incarcerate them, and they’ll do anything to get out.” 

Very few pet owners would think it’s fine to confine their dogs or cats in a cage, or even a whole room, for most of their lives. It shouldn’t be a huge moral leap to extend that concern to smaller animals we might assume are fine with such confinement.

It especially irks Pierce, the bioethicist, that major retailers like PetSmart — which sell live animals and pet supplies — call cages and tanks for smaller animals “habitats.” “That’s another part of tricky advertising,” she told me. “They are not habitats; that’s a lie. But it sounds nice.”

PetSmart and its competitor Petland didn’t respond to interview requests for this story, nor did Pet Advocacy Network, a pet industry lobbying group. Petco, another pet retailer, declined an interview request. 

“Just because you can keep an animal captive doesn’t mean you should.”

Clifford Warwick

In the wild, most of these animals have ranges that span miles and miles, yet in people’s homes, they’re often given a few square feet in a tank. (If they’re “lucky”; PetSmart even sells a half-gallon fish tank, which is about six inches wide.) Some non-aquatic animals might be given free reign of a home, and many get to spend some time outside the cage — a poor substitute for a sprawling savanna or jungle, though better than nothing. But most have little outdoor time, or none at all, out of a fear they’d fall ill, become prey, or, perhaps most reasonably, escape.

Cage confinement also deprives animals of the opportunity to engage in the range of natural behaviors for which they’re evolved. One of those is hunting and foraging for food. It turns out that one of the most basic elements of caring for a pet — regularly giving them enough food — isn’t so straightforward.

“We think, ‘Oh, well, it’s just a kindness to give animals food for free, and they don’t have to do any work,’” Pierce said. “But that’s just such a profound misassumption on our part.” She pointed to research on contra-freeloading, the idea that “if given a choice between a free lunch and working for their lunch, animals will always choose to work for their lunch, except sometimes cats…” Pierce said. “And it makes sense if you think about it from an evolutionary point of view, because we have to work hard in order to get what we need to survive, so there’s going to be some chemical-physiological reward for hard work.”

Some pet-critical experts will make exceptions for small pets that have largely been domesticated, reasoning that it’s easier to meet the needs of species that have been habituated to humans, like rabbits and guinea pigs. 

It sounds like a reasonable enough line to draw, though surveys have found that large swathes of the owners of these more domesticated small animals don’t follow basic care recommendations, such as keeping rabbits in large enclosures and vaccinating them against fatal diseases, or for guinea pigs, raising the highly social animals in pairs or ensuring they have constant access to hay for proper digestion. 

And Pierce argues that it’s a mistake to silo “animals into wild versus domestic, and having different ethical frameworks” for them. “There’s this very sneaky transition from, ‘domesticated equals comfortable around humans’ to ‘domesticated equals comfortable in captivity.’ And that’s a very different thing.”

Other near universal welfare issues among small pets — which apply to our cats and dogs, too — include monotonous and unnatural diets, boredom, and lack of enrichment. Pierce said that handling can also be a problem, considering many small pets are cared for in part by children who may not have the proper motor skills to gently manage them.

“I think a lot of the interactions that animals experience are extremely stressful for them,” Pierce said. In other words, being stuck in a cage is bad, but being taken out can be bad too. 

While some small pet owners certainly form close bonds with their animals, learn extensively about their needs, and become highly attuned to their behavior, research shows that many are unable to properly interpret their pet’s behavior, notice signs of stress, or assess their health. The Internet is riddled with questionable advice and conflicting care tips, leading to what Warwick described as “folklore husbandry.”

“All the animals that were coming in with problems, they were all human-created problems,” Wilson the veterinarian said, and mentioned inadequate light and heat for reptiles and improper diets for exotic pets more broadly as examples. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, Wilson said: “Those two examples — multiply that by a thousand.”

Their needs, and their suffering, might often be overlooked because humans tend to view animals who are further from us on the evolutionary tree as less intelligent and less capable of suffering, according to a 2024 paper published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science. As the study authors put it, this long-entrenched viewpoint likely leads to “unequal treatment of … perceived lower-evolved pets, such as reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates.”

When small pet keeping becomes a bigger problem

Last year, Crystal Heath — a veterinarian and founder of the animal advocacy nonprofit Our Honor — attended the Reptile Super Show, a pet expo, in Southern California. 

There, she found tables and tables of large snakes for sale in enclosures hardly bigger than restaurant takeout containers; turtles trying in vain to escape tiny bins; and lizards confined in cages barely larger than their own bodies. 

She described the atmosphere to me as similar to that of a car show, where people display their rare models and custom work. (Reptile Super Show didn’t respond to an interview request.)

Pet stores can have a similar feel and experience, with animals on display in a fashion not all that different from Victorian-era curio collections, just with live specimens instead of dead ones. 

“If I go back to my own experience…there’s a general sort of fascination with wildlife,” Warwick said about exotic pet owners. “I think that underpins the drive for many, and I see that as perfectly healthy. The problem is it can go very wrong.”

Spend enough time reading pet subreddits and pet ownership surveys, and you’ll see how things can go awry: cage escapes, bites, unpleasant odors, self-mutilation, and excessive noise (birds can get especially loud, and many smaller pets are nocturnal or crepuscular). It’s not unusual for children who once clamored for a snake or a bird to lose interest in their new pets, and lots of owners are unable or unwilling to take care of long-lived species, like parrots and turtles, for the full length of their lives, which results in difficult rehoming.

“Inevitably, the situation for the owner changes over time,” for long-lived species, Wilson, the veterinarian, said. “They get old or they get divorced, or they have a kid or they get sick, and they can’t care for that animal anymore…and there are very few resources for rehoming exotic pets.”

Some people don’t get what they expected in the animal they’ve bought.

Karen Windsor is the executive director of Foster Parrots and the New England Exotic Wildlife Sanctuary, a Rhode Island-based bird and exotic pet sanctuary, and knows this all too well. Windsor told me that on social media people see “that really smart African Gray who can practically have a conversation with you,” and they want one. But after acquiring their parrots, people might quickly learn that some parrots don’t talk at all, and many are not cuddly and don’t want to be handled. That results in disappointed parrot owners trying to dump their birds on organizations like hers, but the inflow of unwanted parrots is far too great for them to take in. 

Some desperate pet owners even abandon their animals in the wild, where they are either poorly adapted to survive or far too well adapted and can wreak havoc on local ecosystems. 

Occasionally, Reddit users share soul-searching posts about their ethical concerns of keeping small pets. Some fellow pet owners respond with similar feelings of unease, but most say that as long as they provide their animal with food, water, enrichment, a clean cage, and other basics, they should feel good about it — that they’re giving them a better life than they would if they were in the wild. 

It’s a curious response, because the choice isn’t whether someone should keep that animal in their home or toss them out into the wild; it’s whether that animal should’ve been bred into existence (or taken from the wild) only to live their life in such intensive, unnatural captivity.

Where small pets come from

Each year, the US imports on average more than 90 million animals — mostly on the smaller side — to keep as pets, according to a new analysis using federal government data by the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. Around 30 percent of them are taken directly from the wild, and many of these are species that are threatened or even endangered. Their trading is facilitated by animal laundering schemes, weak US trade restrictions, and insufficient funding to enforce US wildlife laws. 

“Wildlife exploitation, including for the pet trade, is a major driver of the global extinction crisis,” the organization said in its report. And most of these animals who are taken from the wild never even make it into people’s homes.

In 2009, a PETA investigator worked undercover at a major exotic pet importer in Texas and documented shocking conditions, including tree frogs packed and shipped in 2-liter soda bottles and snakes deprived of food for months. At the time, PETA alleged, the company was a supplier to Petco, PetSmart, and an accredited aquarium.

PETA turned its evidence over to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which seized 26,400 animals from the company.

In a peer-reviewed analysis of the the company’s records in the aftermath of the seizure, experts found that, typically, 72 percent of its animals would die during a six week period — equaling hundreds per day — from cannibalism, dehydration, starvation, crushing, disease, injury, and a range of other problems. It may seem like an abnormally high mortality rate, but in judicial proceedings against the company, it cited an expert who confirmed its mortality rate was similar to the rest of the industry’s. 

But even animals bred in captivity in the US are hardly safe. Facilities that breed fish, reptiles, and amphibians aren’t subject to US Department of Agriculture oversight, and while those that breed birds and small mammals, including rabbits and chinchillas, do face some oversight, there are plenty of loopholes, and USDA enforcement is notoriously weak. 

PETA, for example, has also exposed horrific conditions at some of these large-scale facilities that breed bearded dragons, various reptiles, rats, and numerous other species. And a new investigation, published today in Vox, highlights the cruelty involved in the pet bird breeding business.

Exotic pet breeders have also flocked to social media, where a cottage industry of breeding influencers walk viewers through their operations and how they, too, can get into the biz. Their facilities as they present them often appear much cleaner compared to what has been found in undercover exposés, but they engage in the most troubling aspect of high-volume pet breeding all the same: confining hundreds to thousands of wild animals in small cages.   

What should we do about America’s tens of millions of small pets? 

It is, of course, out of the question to throw America’s tens of millions of small pets out into the wild, where most would surely perish.

The best option for these animals already in our homes is to give them the best lives possible. Build large, complex tank environments, provide enrichment, feed them appropriate diets, learn about their needs and behavior, and follow their lead when it comes to handling, interaction, and time out of the cage or outdoors. 

But to shape a better future, I think it’s time we wind down the mass, factory-style breeding of small pets — and certainly end their capture from the wild. I think it is plainly unethical to prioritize our need for companionship, our feeling that animals are nice or pretty to have around, or our desire to teach children responsibility over the undeniable fact of these animals’ suffering.

Pet stores could — at minimum — stop selling especially small cages and tanks, stop advertising any animal as a low-maintenance pet, and require new pet owners to take classes to learn the basics of good pet care and how to read their animals’ behavior, given how much experts cite a lack of species-specific knowledge as a root cause of poor welfare. 

Austria has gone so far as to mandate such courses, while Sweden requires that guinea pigs — because they’re highly social — be kept in pairs or groups (Switzerland goes further and includes parrots and other highly social species in a similar law).

Other policy actions could help, too.

The federal government should crack down on the illegal exotic pet trade, and the USDA ought to significantly step up its enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act, which covers some animal breeding operations. And Congress should amend this law so all pet breeders are subject to inspection; currently, a number of exemptions result in an untold number of animals being bred essentially without any oversight. 

Already, hundreds of jurisdictions have banned the sale of dogs and cats in pet stores, and some have banned rabbit sales, too. In light of their own investigation into bird mills, the animal advocacy nonprofit World Animal Protection is pushing for New York City to expand its pet retail ban to include birds. 

A dozen European countries have developed short lists of species that are allowed to be kept as pets — what are called “positive” lists — which, by default, prohibit owning any species not on the list. The European Union is considering a continent-wide positive list.

For now, the law of supply and demand is perhaps the strongest law that can be exercised to help small pets in the US; people who have their hearts set on owning a particular species should adopt instead of shop. That’ll be hard, because animal shelters aren’t necessarily overrun with orphaned chinchillas, ferrets, fish, and snakes, but there are some available on popular pet adoption sites and through specialized rescue organizations.

Ultimately, though, I think we need a fundamental shift in how we view animals. I know this shift is possible, because I’ve undergone it. I think back to my younger self, who expressed his love for animals through a pursuit of possessing them — subjecting them to confinement for my pleasure. 

In time, I came to express that love by giving my time and money to organizations that protect animals and their habitats, instead of to pet stores and breeders. I learned about animals through books; documentaries; and most importantly, time in nature. 

Two decades later, that’s still how I get my fill. I’m fortunate enough to live a short drive from a trail system that winds through deciduous forests, and a few times a week, I take long walks as I did when I was a child. I still regularly spot turtles, fish, squirrels, and centipedes, and if I’m lucky, I might see a toad or a heron. They’re living life on their own terms, which, ultimately, is far more satisfying for me to witness than watching them from the other side of a cage.