Comparable or no?

[artgecko]

Different animals with different sets of needs.... The term "puppy mill" is implying that the dogs are confined to a very small cage, unable to move (often the cage is barely enough for them to lay down, etc.), they are not cleaned, they are not treated for illnesses, and they are not given any personal attention in the form of training, etc, and they don't have access to proper food / water.

Dogs are social and extremely active...As in needing to walk / run miles a day. They are pack animals and must have social interactions to be "healthy". They also have a lot of physical issues that can go wrong when housed as they are in puppy mills...i.e. long-haired toy breeds that aren't groomed can develop mats which cause infection and suffering. Being housed on wire floors can cause sores on their foot pads, etc.

Now. There most certainly are keepers (breeders and owners) that keep reptiles and other animals in conditions similar to what you'd see in a puppy mill...foul enclosures, no access to clean water, infrequent food / starvation, no medical treatment, etc. But we'd just call that being a bad owner and neglect / abuse of the animal. I saw such a case when I went to a "serpentarium" when I was on vacation...it was disgusting.. months' worth of sheds, poo, foul or no water, etc. These animals had large, but empty, enclosures and were kept in these horrid conditions.

From those standards in place, you can only draw one parallel between puppy mills and the standard way of breeding BPs here, which is housing... If all of the other needs are being met and the animals look healthy, then they are receiving the proper care, diet, medical attention, have clean access to water, etc. Snakes are not "social" so you can take that factor out as well.

With housing, it gets tricky because there are no hard studies of how active BPs are in the wild (that I know of) for us to compare to. I know that personally, whenever I have my BPs out, they seek to go into a dark tight place and hide...always. I don't see any explorative behavior in mine, they just want to leave and hide. This is in contrast to my boa constrictors who always want to go and explore, seek high places, and climb. Now, I only own 4 BPs, so I have a small sample size to compare. It is known that they spend a significant portion of their lives in burrows / mounds in confined spaces. How much / what percentage? That is the part we are unsure of. This drastically conflicts with dogs, who do not spend a significant portion of their lives confined in the wild (as wolves) which makes confining them for long periods a very unnatural thing that they aren't mentally prepared to handle.

Something else to note would be that many animals who lack mental stimulation or proper environment in captivity will often exhibit negative behaviors... You can see this in zoos where animals "pace" the cage, do repetitive behaviors, or in animals like birds, monkeys, etc. that will self-mutilate if their mental / social needs are not being met, even with cats in a shelter environment, you will see them sitting in their litter box, which is a sign of high stress. I would hazard that if BPs were suffering from confinement in a mental way, you would see similar behaviors in them, which we don't. There are cases of rubbing/ pushing, particularly in retics, but those are usually related to either wanting to eat or mate and trying to leave the enclosure to do so.

I do believe housing should allow the snake to do all of the behaviors that it would naturally.. so, that would be to stretch out, to move around, to coil up, and to hide. To facilitate this, I have mine in the largest tub rack readily available, which is the V70. In this rack, my females can do all of the behaviors I noted and I even have room for hides. They can still fully stretch out, slither around the tub, etc. IMO keeping a snake in a tub or enclosure where they cannot fully stretch out or thermoregulate is not humane. But, for most species, there are tubs / rack sizes available that allow them to do all of these behaviors, so it is more a matter of size.

IMO a better comparison, if you wanted to compare a part of the hobby to puppy mills, would be wholesalers / distributors that sell to large chain stores. Many of these house animals together in small enclosures, don't provide medical care or proper diet, and often have very poor practices in terms of animal welfare...Even going so far as to leave dead animals in with the living, freezing animals alive, etc. There are breeders that could be lumped into that as well, but generally, breeders are concerned with the health of their animals as unhealthy / sickly ones do not breed well.

I think you really have to evaluate breeders (and other businesses / owners) on a case-by-case basis. How they house and care for their animals should be a consideration before you purchase from someone.

You won't find many people that are anti-tub, because the animals have been shown to do well in these conditions (i.e. live, eat, breed, without sickness or negative effects). So you are basically trying to prove that it is harmful even though there are no signs. Now, I believe, as I stated above, that the animals should be given enough room to do natural behaviors, etc. and there are some people housing them in tubs that are too small IMO, but that is something you'd have to look at on a case-by-case basis. Many breeders / owners state that they move an animal up in a tub size and the animal shows negative behaviors (stress, not eating, etc.) and thus they move it back down, so some allowance for individual animals has to be taken into account. Some find an animal stresses in a tub and move it into a larger tub or pvc cage, so there are different circumstances for different animals and owners.