View Topic

People such as myself live in countries with pretty lame/unkeepable wildlife but are animal keeping enthusiasts and thus get animals from abroad or animals originally from abroad but are bred in their countries.
A big issue this causes is that if a sufficient amount of these animals escape to create a breeding population it can become a huge problem for the country as these new animals can potentially spur an environmental disaster and knock out important parts of the food chain.
A good example would be Green Iguanas in Florida, irresponsible owners basically just got bored of them and let them out into the wild where they've established breeding populations and become a pretty big issue.

Ants are the worst for this kind of thing because
A. When the ants want to make new colonies the queen's will fly away, pretty obvious why this may cause escape issues.
B. When any species of ant are introduced into a new environment where the animals haven't adapted to living with them they absolutely destroy pretty much any insect life, waps and bees especially.
C. Ants farm animals that eat plant sap for their honeydew (honeydew is basically just their poop but it's an extremely glucose concentrated substance dew to the fact that they only eat plant sap) and normally these plant sap eating animals are eaten by a plethora of other insects but ants will actively protect them and establish their populations on new plants making their numbers swell massively and causing many species of plant to die as well as massively reducing crop yields.

Also pets are often poached from the wild instead of being bred because for many of them it costs a lot of money to get them to breed. This can have a pretty big effect on these animals populations if it's economical enough to poach and sell them and generally if an animal can't reproduce in captivity it isn't comfortable.

But also if we banned the keeping of non-native pets it would kinda suck for hobbyists such as myself. It's pretty easy to prevent your pets from escaping but a lot of people are careless or don't do enough research before keeping these animals. The big moral debate for me is ants.