The stories keep popping up here and there: a runaway kangaroo in Alabama or a zebra in Tennessee. Now, a deep dive by Slate helps explain what's going on by exploring a largely hidden—yet booming—trade in "exotic pets" in the US. Sam Myers traveled around the US attending rural auctions to see for himself, and the picture he paints is not a pretty one: Think animals stuffed into cramped cages, or makeshift cages made of laundry baskets, buckets, or other household items. "There were peacocks—a popular bird at exotic auctions—shoved in suitcase-shaped cages: long and narrow, with no room for them to stretch their wings," he writes. In many cases, the new owners don't have a clear sense of the animals' particular needs. At one point, Myers overhears an auction worker telling a man interested in foxes, "You can feed it dog food, I guess."
While laws now ban private trade in big cats, other exotic species slip through the cracks. Think camels, alpacas, porcupines, skunks, pythons, and on and on, including the aforementioned kangaroos and zebras. And when you read about, say, a runaway zebra, the animal probably hasn't come from Africa but has been bred here in the US, the descendant of a long-ago zebra turned into a wannabe pet. "Animals who are simply not fit for domestic life are being squished into it," writes Myers, who quotes the head of the Wild Animal Sanctuary as saying that if these animals made good pets, they would have been domesticated eons ago. "The No. 1 problem is that people never want to change their lifestyle to fit the pet or the animal," says Pat Craig. "They want the animal to change to their lifestyle." (Read the full story, which includes the views of collectors, many of whom charge admission to the curious.)
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