The Pet Offensive

The auctioneer started with all manner of exotic rats. I asked the guy sitting beside me, who had driven four hours from south Georgia, if he was going to bid on any of them. "Hell, no," he said. "I can catch all I want."

Boxes the size of suet feeders housed three parakeets each. "One of 'em ain't no longer with us," said the auctioneer's assistant, on opening a box. Cockatiels, half a dozen to a tiny cage, went for $12 each, but a yellow-headed parrot brought $720. "He's a good talker," boomed the assistant. "He's talking now." Lots of sugar gliders, most in tiny cages and some with babies in their pouches, fetched about $30 each. A hedgehog was stuffed in a Tupperware vessel barely larger than the animal itself. There were chinchillas, Siberian chipmunks, capybaras, skunks, and African crested porcupines, two of which leaped off the high table. Two sacred ibises, in a cage not quite high enough for them to stand up, sold for $170 each.

Coatis (skinny southwestern cousins of the raccoon), almost all juveniles, sold briskly; and despite frequent accidents, women pressed them to their breasts. The buyers had no idea what they were in for, at least not until the auctioneer offered an adult that was "definitely handleable" because he'd been castrated. Wallabies sold for something like $45 each. One woman, a seller, held them aloft by the tails while they spun frantically and curled up to bite her. Each time their muzzles got near her hand she'd swat them down. Then she'd plunge her hand in their pouches to see if they were carrying joeys. Kangaroos commanded as much as $850.

The young monkeys had probably suffered less than their mothers, which get so desperate that when their offspring are taken from them they sometimes have to be tranquilized. A frightened baby macaque, clutching a surrogate mother in the form of a cloth leopard, went for $2,150. When the bidding started on the cotton-top tamarin, the auctioneer's assistant warned: "It ain't our fault if your state don't let them in. If you bid, you're obligated by law to buy him." A male and a female marmoset—one collared and one common—fetched $1,010 each. "They will cross," proclaimed the assistant. "You'll get an uncommon marmoset."

The stream of dangerous pathogens doesn't run only from humans to primates. For example, most human cases of herpes B—a disease that kills 70 percent of its victims—result from macaque bites or scratches, and 80 percent to 90 percent of adult macaques carry the virus and intermittently shed it in their saliva or genital secretions.

The snakes, many bred sans pigment and stuffed in pillowcases, were popular, too, especially the big boas and pythons. As bidding started on the yellow rat snakes, the guy from south Georgia leaned over to me and offered: "I done killed half a dozen of them."

I wondered if anyone who bought the cute baby iguanas knew that, as adults, they are apt to deliver dangerous bites with bacteria-laden teeth and can knock you down with their tails.

Also on the auction block were fennec foxes, Arctic foxes, and raccoons. There was no mention of the fact that contact with fox or coon feces can infect you with parasitic worms that bore through your intestines, enter your bloodstream, and migrate through your body, tunneling into your eyes, liver, and brain. Most victims are young children, careless about hygiene. Seeing these animals being cuddled by their new owners reminded me of the time a young mother had phoned a large, respected environmental organization in my home state of Massachusetts to ascertain if it would be okay to nurse her pet raccoon along with her own infant. "Why not," she'd been told. "We're all in this together." It also reminded me of the time, in the 1960s, when I kept a raccoon. My parents would summon me to remove Coonie from the linen closet before some unfortunate soul reached unwittingly for a towel. Despite wearing my hockey gloves, I invariably emerged from the task with at least one laceration or blackened fingernail.

Native and exotic turtles were offered at the auction, including many hatchlings under four inches. Captive-bred reptiles are kept in filthy conditions and fed offal from factory chicken farms. As a result, about 90 percent shed salmonella through their feces. According to the CDC, 70,000 Americans contract salmonella from live reptiles each year. Because of the threat to young children, who tend to put hatchling turtles in their mouths, the domestic sale of turtles under four inches was banned by the FDA in 1975.

Offered, too, were yellow-bellied turtles and common snappers, which, according to the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources (DNR), cannot legally be sold. Scant attention was paid to species anyway. Holding up one turtle, which went for a dollar, the auctioneer's assistant said: "I don't know what kind he is, but here's what he looks like." The pet trade has wiped out whole populations of some of the longer-lived, slower-breeding turtles in the eastern and central United States. "If someone has a bin of, say, box turtles all fully grown with chips and dings in their shells, you know darned well those aren't captive bred [as required by law]," says herpetologist Jim Harding of Michigan State University's Natural History Museum. 'I've been to shows where some guy's got a bin full of box turtles for sale, and every one of them has swollen eyes and puffy front legs, respiratory distress, and cracked shells."