Is it ethical to feed your pets live food?

Is it ethical to feed your pets live food?
By Roxy Green

I suppose that this is just another leg to the 'should we eat meat?' campaign really.

Both reptile keepers and animal nutritionalists alike stress the importance of animals getting the same nutrition they would get in their natural habitat. I mean, you can't feed a snake bread and expect it to live long, right?

However, scientists have developed a line of lizard pellets that have the same, if not more, of the vitamins your pet needs that aren't always present in the bugs you buy. They've been fed nothing but cardboard for hours, if not days. Examples of this are by Zoo Med and Exo Terra, who promise "Exo Terra Bearded Dragon food is a delicious reptile diet, carefully formulated to ensure proper growth and health by providing complete and balanced nutrition. Exo Terra Bearded Dragon food is fortified with optimal levels of vitamins, minerals and amino acids so no other food supplements are required.".Does this take lizards out of the argument? No, I personally have two and only one of them would ever eat the pellets, opting instead for live food whenever she was givien the choice.

If taught to eat pellets as soon as they're on to proper food, they probably would eat them. Many lizard owners stress that they are only interested in food that moves because it's a natural instinct, so the pellets won't really work.

For snake owners there are two options, live mice or frozen mice. If you don't like the idea of either it pretty much prohibits you from keeping one at all. Known for their bad eyesight, snakes wouldn't be able to find a pellet even if one was developed, unless perhaps it either stank or moved.

There's not only the ethics of your pet to consider, but the ethics of the food itself as, after all, it is alive too. It's not always a quick death for them, I've seen my lizards only eat the tail of a worm and drop the head, leaning it to crawl away in what I assume to be agony.

These animals are bred just to be bought, sold and fed alive to reptiles. Is that right?

Well, it's what would have been done in the wild anyway so surely stopping our pets from doing what they do naturally is playing God? The bugs are bred especially for it so if the market wasn't there they'd have never lived at all.