The Ethics of Expertise

At what point in your herpetological journey do you decide when it’s time to share your knowledge with your peers? Keepers around the world can now offer advice to each other through the marvel of the internet.

Chat rooms, dedicated servers, whole communities have sprung up dedicated to the health and welfare of reptiles, amphibians and invertebrates.

This can be nothing but positive. Sharing ideas and discussing husbandry is how we move forward in this hobby. It’s how we develop different methods of care between continents.

But—and this is a big "but", and entirely my own opinion, so put down your pitchforks—when you're big enough, you'll be too old - should an individual who has kept a leopard gecko for approximately 25 minutes really be adding to the conversation?

Gatekeeping

One of the most overused—and, if I'm honest, over-dramatic—words in modern herpetoculture.

Gatekeeping.

"Who gives YOU the right to tell ME I don't know what I'm talking about?"

"How dare you question my opinion?"

We've all seen it. Somebody asks a question, somebody else disagrees with the answer and, before long, somebody inevitably shouts "gatekeeper" and the conversation dies on the spot.

It's a shame really. Because disagreement is how we learn.

I grew up before the internet. Before social media. Before Facebook groups where you could ask a question over breakfast and have three hundred different answers before lunch. When I was born there were only four terrestrial TV channels.

If I wanted to learn about reptiles, I had books. The local library was a godsend.

I had the occasional scientific paper if I could get hold of one.

I had people who'd been keeping reptiles longer than I had.

I'd read everything I could find, fill notebooks with ideas and then go home convinced I'd finally understood it. And sometimes I had.

Quite often...

I hadn't.

I lost geckos that didn't "need" UV.

I lost turtles that supposedly lived perfectly happily on fish.

I lost a tortoise because everybody said, "Just keep it in the garden."

I lost. So I learned.

Information Exchange

The arrival of the information age should have transformed herpetoculture.

For the first time in history, keepers from opposite sides of the world could compare observations, challenge long-held ideas and build on each other's experiences. We suddenly had access to scientific papers, field observations and husbandry discussions that, when I first started keeping reptiles, simply weren't available.

It should have been the moment we collectively asked a simple question.

"What can we learn from the animal itself?"

Instead, far too often, we fell back on something else.

"I've been doing this for thirty years. I know what I'm doing."

"I've never used UV and they've always been fine."

"They don't need all this new stuff. It's just the latest trend."

I've heard every one of those statements over the years.

Sometimes they even came from me.

That's why I wrote If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It.

It followed the story of a twenty-year-old leopard gecko that came into my care while I was working in reptile retail. By every measure that mattered, he was thriving. He'd lived under a heat mat, a compact UVB bulb, fairly uninspiring substrate and an enclosure that offered very little opportunity for natural behaviour.

Yet there he was. Healthy. Alert.

In remarkable condition for his age.

The point of that article wasn't to argue that modern husbandry is unnecessary.

It was the opposite.

If something is working, understand why it's working... then ask whether you can make it even better.

To me, that's what good keepers do.

We don't ridicule people for not knowing something.

We don't protect information as though it's ours alone to give.

We challenge assumptions.

We ask questions.

And when somebody wants to learn...

We help them.

Because the moment we stop learning from one another is the moment husbandry stops moving forward.

Toxicity

"Toxic" is another one of those words that gets thrown around far too easily these days.

Ironically, one of the quickest ways I've found to be labelled toxic in herpetoculture is...

...to ask questions.

I've lost count of the number of online groups I've been quietly removed from over the years. No arguments. No shouting. No personal attacks. Usually just a polite message saying I'd been removed.

The reason?

I asked too many questions.

Apparently, questioning accepted husbandry wasn't considered discussion.

It was considered disruption.

I've never really understood that. Surely questions are how we improve?

If nobody had questioned whether leopard geckos benefit from UVB, we'd probably still be telling people they don't need it.

If nobody questioned heat mats, bioactive enclosures or behavioural enrichment, we'd still be keeping reptiles exactly as we did thirty years ago.

Questions aren't the enemy of good husbandry.

They're the reason it improves.

More recently I've had similar experiences on TikTok. People have criticised the condition of rescue animals without knowing the story behind them. Missing limbs, metabolic bone disease, neurological problems... to some viewers they're simply examples of poor husbandry.

Except they aren't.

They're examples of what happens when poor husbandry has already occurred.

There's an important difference.

Context matters.

I'll happily spend hours discussing evidence with anyone.

Show me a better paper. A better observation. Point out something I've misunderstood.

I've even been known to argue passionately before realising I was talking about the wrong bloody species.

It happens.

I'd much rather be corrected than remain wrong.

Because that's how we learn.

And that's how we move husbandry forward.

What Next?

I don't have all the answers. If I did, I'd have stopped asking questions years ago. What I do know is that we need to get better at listening to each other.

Imagine someone saying,

"Kevin’s developed a new way of incubating corn snake eggs and he's getting a 100% hatch rate."

The response shouldn't be,

"What does he know? He's only been breeding snakes for five years."

It should be,

"Interesting... how's he doing it?"

Now, if Kevin stands up and announces that everyone else has been wrong for the last thirty years, that's a very different conversation.

The ethics of expertise isn't about whether you should speak. It's about knowing how confidently you should speak.

Keeping reptiles for thirty years doesn't automatically make me an authority on everything with scales, but it does give me perspective. I've watched this hobby change. I've changed with it. I've been wrong, and I have no doubt I'll be wrong again.

My experience doesn't give me the right to stop learning.

It gives me the responsibility to keep learning.

If asking questions becomes a problem, we've stopped doing science and started protecting opinions. When that happens, the only thing that really suffers is the animal in the middle of the debate.