For many years I worked in an aquatics and reptile superstore, eventually managing the small—but mighty—reptile department. I was responsible for everything from ordering livestock and equipment to breeding projects, husbandry standards and the day-to-day care of hundreds of animals.
On paper, I sold reptiles.
In reality...
I sold conversations.
Every day somebody would walk through the door wanting their first reptile. Sometimes they'd spent months researching the species they wanted. Sometimes they'd done no research whatsoever and expected to walk out with a two-foot lizard whose dietary requirements are complicated enough to leave Gordon Ramsay questioning his life choices.
Those conversations became the most important part of my job.
Yes, I had a department to run. Animals to order. Enclosures to maintain. Staff to train. But somewhere between the rescues, the rehabilitation cases and the endless stream of "my son doesn't want it anymore" stories, my priorities quietly changed.
I stopped asking,
"What animal does this person want?"
And started asking,
"Is this person ready for the animal they're asking for?"
I know that probably sounds like a herpetological power trip.
It wasn't.
It was self-defence.
Not for me.
For the animals.
Just Say No!
There were plenty of people who walked through those doors that reminded me why I loved the job. Genuine hobbyists. Proper keepers. The sort of people who would happily spend an hour discussing thermostats, UV indices or the calcium content of a feeder insect before they'd even think about choosing an animal. As their collections grew, so did the complexity of the species they kept, and it was a privilege to be a small part of that journey. I helped where I could, advised on enclosures and diets, and, when I didn't know the answer, I went away and found it. I didn't know everything then, and I certainly don't now.
But retail has another side.
Impulse buyers.
Trend followers.
Parents trying to keep a promise they'd made far too quickly.
And, on more than one memorable occasion...
"I kept one twenty years ago. It'll be exactly the same."
It rarely was.
Saying no to a customer is one of the least comfortable things you can do in retail. Every instinct tells you to make the sale. Every business wants turnover. Every customer expects to leave with what they've come in for.
But my team and I weren't just responsible for selling animals.
We were responsible to them.
That changes the conversation.
We couldn't, in good conscience, hand a living animal to anybody carrying a fistful of cash and a crocodile grin.
More than once I found myself saying something that became almost a running joke.
"I wouldn't sell you a rock."
Penny will tell you there was some scattered profanity through the statement, but I stand by it.
Not because I thought I was better than anyone.
Because, after enough years, you start to recognise something that's very difficult to teach.
You can usually tell when somebody's heart is in herpetoculture.
You can see it in the way they stop halfway across the shop because they've spotted a juvenile dart frog tucked behind a bromeliad.
You can hear it when they ask about UV output before they ask about price.
You watch their eyes follow a day gecko across the ceiling while everyone else is looking at the snake with the brightest colours.
They're not shopping.
They're already keeping.
Responsibility
If I said no to somebody, the outcome was often depressingly predictable. They would simply drive to the nearest competitor and buy exactly the same animal. No questions. No discussion. Just money exchanged for a living creature. I won't name names—although buy me a cup of tea one day and I'll happily point you in the direction of a couple of places that still make my blood pressure rise—but it happened often enough that I could almost predict how the next few weeks were going to unfold.
The new keeper would get the animal home, discover that reptiles don't arrive with decades of husbandry experience bundled neatly inside the box and eventually run into trouble. Sometimes it would be feeding, sometimes heating, sometimes lighting, sometimes something as simple as not understanding normal behaviour. They would ring the shop they had bought the animal from, only to discover that once the sale had gone through, the conversation had ended. More often than not, they eventually found their way back to me.
That left me with a dilemma that, strangely enough, never really felt like one. I was now giving my time to somebody who hadn't bought an animal from us, advising on husbandry that generated no income for the business and helping to solve problems that commercially belonged to somebody else. None of that bothered me in the slightest because the snake, lizard or tortoise sitting in front of me hadn't chosen where it had been bought. It certainly hadn't chosen the advice that came with it. As far as I was concerned, its welfare came first. The till receipt was completely irrelevant.
Unfortunately, businesses don't always have the luxury of looking at things that way. More than once I found myself explaining why I'd refused a sale, and more than once I found myself answering the same question.
"Why didn't you sell them the animal?"
Apparently my response of, "Because I wouldn't sell them a rock," wasn't considered a particularly robust business strategy.
So I found myself defending my decisions with words like welfare, responsibility and husbandry. I knew I'd never win that argument completely because I understood the other side of it. Businesses exist to make money. Directors have wages to pay, electricity bills to cover and stock to move. I never lost sight of that. But I also had something else sitting on my shoulder every time I looked into an enclosure.
My own conscience.
That little voice has never once asked me how much profit a snake made.
It has only ever asked me whether I did the right thing by the animal.
The Paradox
As we all know, hindsight is a wonderful thing. Looking back now, I'm not entirely convinced that refusing sales improved welfare or changed very much at all.
At the time, saying no felt like the morally right decision. I was responsible for that animal while it was in my care and selling it to a complete knobend was never part of my job description. I wanted every reptile that left my department to thrive in its new home, not slowly deteriorate because somebody had underestimated the responsibility that came with owning it.
But refusing a sale was never really the goal.
Education was.
Whenever somebody walked in who I felt simply wasn't ready for the species they'd chosen, I'd try to steer the conversation rather than end it. I'd explain why I had concerns, talk them through the basics and, more often than not, send them home with a care sheet.
Now, I've said this repeatedly throughout my articles and observations: care sheets are not the enemy. They're an excellent starting point. The problem isn't the care sheet; it's treating it as the finish line instead of the starting line. The real learning begins afterwards. Do you read more? Do you look at current research? Do you compare different approaches? Do you ask questions? In my opinion...
You should.
If I could persuade somebody that a monitor lizard wasn't the right fit but a bearded dragon might be... if I could swap a large snake for a smaller, more forgiving species... if I could send somebody home excited rather than overwhelmed... I counted that as a win.
And, surprisingly often, so did they.
Many of those customers came back a few weeks later.
Sometimes with a different species.
Sometimes with better questions.
Occasionally just to tell me they'd spent the last fortnight reading everything they could get their hands on.
Those were the conversations that mattered.
Because I wasn't trying to stop people becoming reptile keepers.
I was trying to help them become better ones.
The aim was never to stop somebody keeping reptiles. It was to give them the best possible chance of keeping them well.
Who Carries the Weight?
So who carries the weight?
Who bears the responsibility for the welfare of that animal?
Is it the conscientious breeder who knows every individual animal by sight, or the backyard breeder who's only interested in the next clutch and the next sale?
Is it the wholesaler, supplying animals and equipment to retailers across the country?
Is it the retailer who refuses a sale because it doesn't feel right, or the one who's happy to exchange a living animal for a bank card and a smile?
Is it the new keeper, who ultimately takes that animal home and becomes responsible for every decision that follows?
Or...
Does responsibility simply pass from one pair of hands to the next, following that animal throughout its life?
I don't think there's a single answer.
I think it's all of us.
Every person who breeds, imports, wholesales, sells, advises or keeps reptiles leaves a fingerprint on that animal's life. Sometimes it's obvious. Sometimes it's almost invisible. But every decision matters.
The responsibility doesn't begin when an animal arrives in our homes.
It begins the moment somebody decides to breed it.
From that point onwards, every pair of hands that animal passes through has the opportunity to improve its future...
...or diminish it.
The morality of the reptile trade isn't measured by how many animals we sell.
It's measured by how many continue to thrive long after they've left us.
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