Children's book

[ben_tajer]

Just an idea to throw out there:

The other day while I was riding on the Madison bus system to get to a pet store, I started up a conversation with one of the drivers and he started asking me about my axolotls. While we were talking I noticed a mother and her two young children (probably about 8 and 9) were listening to everything I was saying about axolotls and tiger salamanders. This event made me remember when I was a six year old kid living in switzerland and my dad gave me an alpine newt he had found in front of my house to keep in a small pet pal for about three days. You guys might disagree with me, but I think newts, well maybe just a few species of newts and salamanders, are good pets for kids 8-12 (and their parents). I know that I my self have learnt a lot of life lessons from my pets (I've kept newts since twelve, and pets since the age of 10), and I think that a well supervised child could also learn much from caudates. Imagine it, a small booklet using simple languages and good illustrations so that parents and kids would have a resource to go off of that was better than the advice from the pet store. Such a book would probably start off with a message to the parents about how they should intervene when a child is not taking good care of pets. After that it would continue on to a brief natural history about amphibians and salamanders (maybe even with an illustration of newts living along side dinosaurs, and of course the giant eryops), followed by a section on selecting and quarantining healthy animals, a section on setting up and decorating a tank, a section on general upkeep and water testing, individual sections on commonly available and easy species (A. mexicanum, A. tigrinum, P. watl, C. orientalis, can people think of others?), and maybe ending with a breeding section. Naturally, the URL to caudata culture and caudata.org would be placed somewhere in the book. If you object t this idea, just think for a second: we can't stop parents from buying newts for their kids, but we can at least try to give them a guide so that they don't go about trying to replicate pet store conditions or do something completely idiotic like throwing a fire salamander in with some tropical fish. When people go to a bit store they don't necessarily think about the decision in advance, a lot of purchases are on impulse and the only advice they have is the word of the shop keeper. When they go home, they might not go straight to the internet and find us. Sure there are other books out there, I own a few, but many of them are a bit too technical for kids and their parents, outdated, visually boring, or some combination. We've got some great photographers, good writers, good artists, and put to together, and an abundance of experience. Again, I'm just throwing this out there as an idea, kid's like caudates, and caudates have a lot to offer.

 

[Lasher]

An interesting idea, though I dont think mis-housing herps is a mistake confined to parents buying them for their spawn.
Some kind of basic care sheet that shop owners could offer(preferably for free) would be nice to see. I used to frequent a pet shop in Exeter which did so(off their own backs, it was a family run store who really cared about the animals well being), just a photocopied A4 page giving basic care and housing info in 'plain english'.

I agree herps make great pets for children, but I dont think pet shops emphasise enough that they are not a 'tactile' pet and it takes some effort on the owners part to set up an appropriate habitat.

Unfortunatley there would be no profit in such a venture, so it doesnt seem likely to happen to me.

 

[Abrahm]

While the idea is great in principal, I don't know how well it would work. I used to work in a pet store and sold a lot of pets to parents and their children. Lasher hit on one of the big things that kids want: something tactile. If they can't handle it then they don't really want it.

I've found that parents do not want to spend a lot of money. They usually expect the new pet to last less than one year, and often it seems they hope for it. They gauge their purchases accordingly by trying to buy the cheapest setup possible. I think it is all part of a vicious cycle where parents buy suboptimal housing and the animal dies quickly, this gets spread and then we have all the anecdotal evidence of fish only living three months and newts dying in six. Very few of the parents I sold animals too would dream of buying a book on top of the already far too expensive cage and equipment that I had chosen for them.

Reptiles and amphibians are not cheap animals to keep, we should all know this but most people don't. They live a long time and parents often don't want to care for them when little Jimmy gets bored of his fire belly newt. Purchasing an animal should be a commitment and not a consumer good that can be discarded within the month if its not fun. We really need a shift in our perception of pet owner ship for this to really work wide scale.

That said, the only reason I could keep working at that pet store was because of the handful of people I talked to and changed their minds about their animals. I made sure at least a dozen guinea pigs had awesome homes, I helped two or three owners properly keep salamanders and a bunch of other similar cases. You can't affect everyone, or even a majority, but you can reach out to the few who are willing to learn.