Ethically Sourced Locally Grown Small Batch Husbandry Reptiles For Sale

Year-over year, the reptile hobby has been dragging in word soup from other areas to make exclusive clubs and tribes. What are they saying?

Introduction

As reptile keepers, many people in the industry seemingly fall for some very basic manipulative tricks. Marketing around ideas and products often directly engage in manipulative behavior to avoid solving real concerns in the hobby.

Discussing these practices can help information consumers sniff out some of the misleading tactics used to delay progress. The hopes are that someone that may be entering into exotic animal care responsibilities for the first time won't be confused and expertly misdirected by co-opted concepts and outdated terms.

Terminology Walkthrough

Husbandry

Thrown around relentlessly, husbandry is used by many throughout social media to simply describe as little as any combination of temperature and humidity. It is used as a way of self-validating opinions while discussing topics through more formal language. While reptile keepers are certainly vulnerable to this trick, you can find it throughout other animal related hobbies. This is, unfortunately, not correct.

Husbandry, originating from the work the husbandman did on a farm, described the tasks necessary for a man to care for a farm and household. This has some obvious inherently antiquated concepts of not only cultural/societal roles but also the roles of animals.

If you asked what "animal husbandry" is the first thought should quite literally be a male farmer with his son working in a field while his wife and daughter cleaned the house in preparation for when they slaughter the family pet pig for dinner. As mentioned, this is quite antiquated.

Places of education used to have animal husbandry programs that have long since been renamed away from those antiquated terms. When you do find an animal husbandry program you will find that the majority of it covers producing more animals as goods or to be processed into goods.

You will still find this term used in journals describing things like leopard gecko husbandry - which again, inherently, suggests you are using these animals to produce goods in the form of their offspring or products derived from the animal. One reason you will find this term in these journals is because the journals' goals are to produce more animals.

If you are a keeper with a single ball python in your home it seems quite ridiculous to claim to be "doing animal husbandry".

The modern term has long been animal science.

The reptile hobby itself through self appointed Animal Husbandry Experts and Advanced Husbandry Experts is enforcing that a man is on a farm producing tiny crested gecko pork chops to feed his family – which is not indicative of the "hobby" whatsoever.

Small Batch Reptiles

Using a term from hobbies like microbrewing to describe producing reptiles is really difficult to understand.

Small batch production is a term used to indicate that products are produced at a smaller quantity for a variety of reasons including cost reduction and increasing profits. Using this term within an animal focused hobby is really strange.

Small batch production (in non-animal related areas) does benefit by being able to re-prioritize and correct quality concerns quickly while outright discarding any possible "bad batch" problems.

If this term was used to discuss iterating breeding programs by leveraging technologies like science supplemented breeding programs it could fall under the methodology of small batch production but otherwise it suggests that breeders are intentionally limiting the number of offspring produced for some artificial reason.

If I had to take a personal opinionated guess, that guess would be that individuals heard and saw "small batch" as a good thing and decided it implied they weren't overproducing animals and ran with it.

Ethical Keeping

This is a big one.

The reason this term exists is to increase search keyword hits and isolate parts of the community.

A very elementary manipulation tactic, the term ethical keeping is designed to coerce individuals away from specific sources of information (isolation) and keep those individuals consuming specific types of content. It is an artificial "us vs them" tribal mentality used to keep individuals engaged with only specific and limited sets of information.

A classic example of this involved the Reptile Lighting Forums group who dubbed themselves "ethical" and began giving certificates and stamps of approval. Videos produced by their chosen content creators were then promoted and dubbed "peer reviewed" – which is entirely misleading when the presenter is a young man that was choosing to eat Calcisand(tm) to prove it's safe for bearded dragons. What peers approved things like this The material was certainly not peer reviewed by anyone of merit and arguably nothing resembling ethics occurred.

People using "ethical keeping" as a crutch to describe their content are relying on consumers to make knee-jerk assumptions that, if this content is "ethical", other content is unethical. It's a manipulative tactic to keeping customers.

Recently, Responsible Reptile Keeping has tried this same tactic.

There will certainly be individuals that can be qualified as "unethical" in their overproduction of animals in terrible environments with awful shipping conditions overcrowded in spaces they shouldn't be in... which is an extreme. Language should be reserved for those scenarios. These conditions are unacceptable.

Creating a murky environment of social media users using "ethical" (and implying anything else isn't) to promote their content should be considered shameful.

A Growth Mindset

At the most naive, having a growth mindset is the concept of having a growth mindset means you are "open to learn". That very naive explanation from around 2006.

As a professional in professional environments, my growth mindset involves having an interest in and being disciplined in several areas (reptiles AND computer science, for example). I can adopt ideas from one hobby to another and vice versa to further extend understanding within both interests. I can learn and perform better with practice. I am willing and able to put in effort that results in feedback to iterate on what I've done. Challenges are engaging and interesting instead of being defeating.

On the flip side, having a fixed mindset of there only being a limited possible set of answers and avoiding every challenge is indicative of having a closed mindset.

This is an ongoing and a very popular discussion throughout academia with several changes throughout the years. If you would like an introduction to a growth mindset you can visit this article on Psychology Today.

It was somewhat shocking to see several content creators try to shoehorn growth mindset into their material. The same content creators generally have the idea that UVB solves everything (this is a closed mindset), that they were ethical (manipulative) and capable of judging others (this is a closed mindset), and that all challenges needed to be treated with animosity (this is a closed mindset)... and instead praised themselves for just thinking differently than others so they can fall back to manipulative tactics of isolating consumers from other sources of information.

As one tiny example, I invite you to present a point of discussion to those individuals: birds, which are avian reptiles, require vitamin D in their development and throughout their life. The mechanism in producing vitamin D for wild birds is slightly different than reptiles, but still requires UVB in the wild, and yet we have specific diets for several species of birds that result in healthy birds without deformities. UV lamps are not "ethical" or required for birds.
Why?

Solving the question above will require someone that is not in a fixed mindset exploring interdisciplinary options to find a solution in reptile keeping. Instead, it is guaranteed you will get the response of "Arcadia bulbs simulate the sun" which concretes that these individuals do not have a growth mindset.

It was very weird to see growth mindset introduced to so many naive reptile keepers this way. If you are a reptile keeper with a growth mindset then you are currently practicing interdisciplinary exploration of how to improve the health and welfare of those animals – not promoting manipulative tactics to isolate consumers.

Conclusion

This has been a visit of many of the terms that continue to be tossed around. If you find any others be sure to let us know on Discord.

If you don't believe people are actually using these terms in such weird ways then be sure to go visit Happy Dragons – where "ethical" keepers that deplore tub breeding use tubs to "small batch" breed reptiles "ethically" while pretty much using all the exact same methods and diets as all of the other breeders throughout FaunaClassifieds and MorphMarket.

You aren't ethical. I am. I hope the humor lands in this statement as a reflection of the article.