In a pet shop on the outskirts of a small city, clear plastic crates with air holes are piled one on top of another – five deep and four in a row, 20 in total.
“Hognose Albino Anaconda, £239,” reads one label. “Milk Snake Apricot Pueblan, £130,” says a second. And “Corn Snake Blood Red, £85,” a third.
The plastic crates are small, but then so are the inhabitants. The shop only sells baby reptiles, one of the owners says. The labels are instructive – they tell you not only that the colours matter, but that they aren’t necessarily what you’d find in the wild.
In one vivarium, there’s a large rusty orange lizard with a long whiplash tail. Despite its colour, it’s a green iguana, a beast that can grow to 1.7m long.
Breeding distinctive, unusual morphs is common in this business. It’s what enthusiasts desire. They have a reputation for being nerdy. Indeed, owning a reptile for many is more like a hobby than having a pet.
“I understand what drives people to keep them,” says Clifford Warwick, who has been researching the reptile trade for more than three decades.
“They are fascinating. You couldn’t keep a whale in your room, but you can have a snake.”
But Warwick is a trenchant critic of all aspects of the reptile pet business – it’s very hard to keep or transport them humanely, he argues. Many are taken from the wild, impacting their conservation status, and they spread diseases, such as salmonella, to humans.
Some get out into the wild, as Burmese pythons in Florida have done, and impact other wildlife.
“European green lizards, slow worms and tortoises will be quite content within the spatial divisions of a domestic garden,” he responds when asked whether it’s acceptable to keep any reptiles as pets.
In terms of welfare, Warwick says that there are all sorts of difficulties with getting the temperature of a vivarium correct.
In the wild, reptiles regulate their body temperature to a single degree Celsius through careful positioning, and ill health, reproductive status and whether they have eaten can all affect this.
Male reptiles have an essentially unlimited home range, Warwick continues. Show people a picture of an iguana in a vivarium, he says, and they’re OK with it, but then a small dog?
“A dog is way more comfortable in captivity than an iguana, but you’d be prosecuted if you kept one in a cage.”
But Tony Wigley, co-founder of Responsible Reptile Keeping (RRK), which describes itself as the “go-to resource for evidence-based information and support”, could not disagree more. There’s no evidence that there is a major issue with the welfare of captive reptiles in the UK, he argues.
“The number of rehomed dogs outnumbers rehomed reptiles by 20 to one,” he says.
Indeed, he argues that not only are the majority in the UK well looked after, they are the best pet anyone can have. You’re far more likely to catch nasty diseases off cats, Wigley points out.
“Which pet isn’t going to miss you when you go to work?” he asks. “Won’t howl and annoy your neighbours? Won’t leave faeces or hair in your flat? Won’t eat your wildlife? Won’t injure you?”
He doesn’t need to say that the answer to all these questions is reptiles, not cats or dogs.
Britain’s reptile pet trade
Wigley acknowledges that there are some issues. Last year, 70 starving and many dead royal (or ball) pythons were discovered at a property in Durham.
One peer-reviewed paper from 2012 estimated that 75 per cent of pet reptiles die within a year of being bought, though another paper in 2016 found this figure to be 3.6 per cent.
That 2016 study also found that “97 per cent of snakes, 87 per cent of lizards and 69 per cent of tortoises and turtles acquired by respondents over five years were reported to be captive-bred”.
Reptiles are just one wing of what is usually called the exotic pet trade, which also includes birds such as parrots, huge numbers of tropical fish and smaller numbers of mammals.
“Dogs and cats have been domesticated over thousands of generations and cohabit with us relatively easily,” says Mark Jones, head of policy at the Born Free Foundation. “Those species that have not gone through this process are not accustomed to being managed in such an intense way.”
Rules and regulations
The scale of the business is enormous. The Federation of British Herpetologists says there may be nearly five million reptiles and frogs kept as pets in the UK, with the two most popular being the royal python and the corn snake.
There are some regulations around keeping exotic pets. There’s the Dangerous Wild Animals Act (DWAA) 1976, which, as its name implies, imposes restrictions on keeping all manner of large or dangerous animals, including venomous snakes, crocodilians, and Komodo dragons and other lizards.
From April 2026, anyone keeping specifically a primate (many of which are also covered under the DWAA) will require a licence.
Then there is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which regulates those species that can be exported from and into signatory countries. It is ineffective, critics say, when it comes to exotic pets, because it has limited information on what is really happening and is massively underfunded.
A report published last year by the Australian NGO Nature Needs More described the exotic pet trade as “an unnecessary luxury in need of regulation” and said “there is no data source” that shows which species are being traded as pets, in what quantities and between which countries.
Conservation and the pet trade
There is some limited evidence for the conservation impacts of the pet trade on reptiles. A paper published in 2020 by the journal Nature Communications analysed the online reptile trade and found that half of all the traded individuals were taken from the wild and that 75 per cent of the trade was not covered by international regulations.
Another study from 2020 of the royal python trade from West Africa found that, despite the advent of what is called ranching (a halfway house between wild capture and captive breeding), “hunting [for the pet trade] remains an economically valuable endeavour” for rural people, and that hunters are reporting fewer snakes in the wild than there were five years ago.
According to Warwick, 100,000 royal pythons are taken from the wild in West Africa every year. “They are taken from their burrows,” he says. “It’s not a pretty sight. Captive-breeding doesn’t work.”
Wigley disputes this. While, in the 1980s and 1990s, most pythons were caught in the wild, that is not the case anymore. In the UK, 99 per cent are captive-bred because it makes economic sense.
“They are the most captive-bred wild animal on the planet,” he suggests.
Another issue is newly discovered species. One study found 43 species that had only recently been named by science and were not listed under international trade regulations, including Sylvia’s tree frog and the golden bug-eyed frog, native to Central America and Vietnam respectively. Both were described for the first time in 2018 and found in the European pet trade the following year.
Should the reptile pet trade be regulated?
Nature Needs More and Born Free both argue that, instead of regulating or banning trade in certain species, CITES should produce positive lists of those that can be safely exploited, with everything else therefore off-limits.
“Anyone trading in exotic live animals or pets would have to pay, first, a registration fee to be able to trade [in that species]; and, second, additional licensing fees if those animals are deemed to be at risk during transport or warehousing,” says Peter Lanius of Nature Needs More.
Mark Jones says such a model should be extended to the way governments control the exotic pet business within their borders. There are a number of countries already doing this, he says, but it’s not clear how effective any of these schemes are. (Not at all, argues Wigley.)
Nevertheless, it is a policy Born Free and the Scottish SPCA are lobbying for in Scotland with a campaign called ‘Don’t Pet Me’. It says reptiles and birds should not be kept as pets because natural instincts such as burrowing or climbing cannot be met, they are kept in inadequate cages, and have inappropriate diets.
Wigley is fiercely opposed to the positive list approach, and RRK has extensive information on why it would be a bad idea. He argues that it would drive a lot of reptile-keeping underground and result in less optimal welfare outcomes and more illegal trade.
At the pet shop, a mother with two young children comes in to buy a Hermann’s tortoise, a popular pet native to the European Mediterranean region. Reading the literature tells you this species was once taken from the wild in bucketloads but that captive breeding now exists.
Crucially, though, when it comes to the individuals sold in your local store, you cannot be sure of anything.
