Buying an Exotic Pet Online? Beware...

For some of the more uncommon exotic pets, buying online may be an option you look at since it can be hard to find a local breeder or broker. However, buying online, sight unseen, can be a big risk. It might be a good option if you are able to find an animal online and then travel to the source to pick up your pet, prepared to walk away if things aren't right. If not, you take a risk on getting an animal that was raised in stressful or unsanitary conditions, that is poorly socialized (and hard to handle), and/or that is unhealthy or malnourished. Or, you may not get your animal at all.

I have mentioned concerns over buying online before. It was first brought to my attention in the case of someone who had responded to an ad for a young kinkajou, and they were sent photos that were duplicates of photos that were posted on my site. That person thought something was fishy so wrote to me -- and and confirmed that the photos were submitted over a year previously so could not be photos of a baby that was currently for sale -- a big red flag. So every now and then I do a search for kinkajous for sale, and inevitably I find multiple ads, on a variety of classifieds sites, that feature a variety of photos that are also found in my Kinkajou Photo Gallery. Usually the ads are for babies when the photos I have on my site are of kinkajous that would now be well into adulthood. I suppose it is possible that maybe these owners are selling offspring of these kinkajous. Or, I suppose the sellers could just have lifted the photos from my site to illustrate what a kinkajou looks like (after all the ads often don't directly claim to be selling the kinkajou pictured), but if they actually have kinkajous for sale, wouldn't they be able to post their own photos? The reason I am immediately skeptical is that I know of at least 2 other cases just like the one I mentioned above, where the seller claimed to be selling the babies using photos that are also shown in my photo gallery. Anyway, I am concerned.

I'm not here to disparage anyone who is legitimately selling animals online and the ads I have seen may be perfectly legitimate. However, this number of ads I see like this is worrying to me. Since one of the photos I have commonly seen in ads was suddenly getting a lot of views last week I thought it might be worth posting a warning: buyers beware. If you are shopping for an exotic pet online, it is literally a jungle out there and you want to be careful about what you are getting.