Reptile Forum, Reptile Classifieds - CaptiveBred

[shay_]

[Sean]

Yes Shay you raise some interesting points and I do agee with your way of thinking to a point, but you could take it a step further and say well then why keep reptiles or any other animal at all in captive conditions. Do we abolish like slavery? then we have no hobby after all is it natural anyway to keep anything, I don't think minor details make much of a difference if you want to take it to the extreme of a moral question.

[Sean]

Going back to some of the points Ron made regarding smuggling and licensing. We know hundreds of animals are being smuggled in and out of Australia each year anyway some probably in terrible conditions. Notice I say into Australia as well because it is two way traffic they want what they can't get either. If it was regulated and licensed to qualified individuals or institutions it would at least stop most if not all of the illegal trade. A country which is a prime example is Peru they banned all export, but species were still being smuggled out in appalling conditions you name it coke bottles, film canisters etc. They have now regulated certain breeders and allowed captive bred species to be exported, this as helped the locals who take an interest into protecting wild populations in the forest by being rewarded incentives. Surely if Peru are capable of managing this then why not Australia?

[Sam Sweet]

[lophius]

[Sean]

Sam, I give an hatchling spenceri 32ft of floor space these measure 10 in all are housed individually, in order for you to match my requirements of the equivalent you must house your 9ft salvadorii in 288ft of floor space and if you house 2 together then 576ft of floor space.

If you want I can give you the full volumetric area but I don't think you would match this either.

What makes me laugh is that you or Shay have never seen my enclosures only a glimpse but you assume I keep my monitors in a tiny box.

[Sam Sweet]

Well said, Carl

That is the sort of response that builds a progression on common ground. Wrong-minded was simply the antonym for discussing how to meet basic needs, and I'll be happy to use 'suspected or acknowledged negative deviation from biologically sufficient and efficatious administration of husbandry' henceforth. Point's still the same, however, and it includes the concept that something is not working. You have your cumingi and it doesn't work (yet), I have my crocs and doreanus and it doesn't work (yet). This part of the discussion isn't about keeping ackies.

I don't know how to quantify "quality of life" from the perspective of a monitor, and neither do you nor does anyone else. To a positive assertion on that score by an AZ'ole in the US I suggested that he open his pens and see what the monitors chose -- three squares a week and a warm place to sit, or the risk of starving, freezing and ending up as coyote supper. We all know the answer to that, and more generally I think we can agree that if I was to put the acme of monitor cages, door open, out bush in New Guinea I'd return to find no monitors living in it. So given the option they will reject our best approximations, right?

I am inclined to say that living space has a lot to do with this, and that breeding large monitors is causally related to giving them some minimum of breathing room. Unfortunately, this minimum scales up to pose severe practical constraints. You don't often see enclosures for large monitors that are even scaled up proportionally from what works for ackies or tristis, even in zoos. For these species I'd bet that something like 80% of the breeding occurs in the largest 20% of enclosures. We'd call some of those large enclosures deficient in other ways, but they work.

I've not seen either V. cumingi or V. salvadorii in the wild (yet), but can imagine that the modal adult V. cumingi is right now half-submerged in a vegetation mat at the edge of a rank stream, and the modal salvadorii is in epiphytes on a branch 25 m up a fruiting tree. Neither of them has seen another of their species within 30 m for 3 weeks, and they've had actual physical contact for less than a couple of hours in the past year. This is by choice. Pairs don't live together, chronic togetherness is simply too stressful and they go their own ways. In this context, what is the minimum we can provide to captives to get behaviors (a), (b), (c), or simply (d) to stay alive? It's a sliding scale, and at the lower end animals don't 'know how' to die, it's imposed on them.

You like each of your cumingi and hope to breed them, both highly commendable points, but how are you set up to breed even a pair, realistically? Who meets whom where, and on whose terms? Can the animals choose based on their own condition, or have you got to infer that on their behalf? Nest site choice and construction looks to be pretty hard-wired in monitors, so how close can you get to something the female can accept? These are not criticisms, they are precisely the same questions I cannot answer confidently for my crocs. The simplistic answer is to say that neither of us has any business keeping the animals that we do, given our chances of a lottery win that would expand cage space manyfold. It is only slightly more defensible to say that we are learning from failure, or that the animals would assuredly have worse care in other hands. However, we can do better and should not acquiesce to not mentioning the problems.

I keep monitors in part because I am constrained from living with wild ones, and in part because I can learn a great deal from captives which can save me weeks or months of frustration when I get out to do field studies on those species. My enthusiasm is hardly shared by my university, and I regularly decline the suggestion to be a good boy and work on fruit flies or guppies instead, but those aren't monitors, right?

As to insights from fieldwork, would anyone care to guess the species of monitor shown in silhouette in my last post above?

[Sam Sweet]

Psst Sean, the discussion has moved on, thank you

[Sean]

[Sam Sweet]

I saw your post, are you having a nice tantie? Look up euphemism, getting it wrong seems to be a bit of a hallmark. Frank who?