Worried about reptile owner's careless handling
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A group of friends including myself are running an anime convention in August, and in the run up to the big event we've hosted a few mini-events. There's a girl who has turned up at them who happens to own reptiles and I'm very concerned about them.
The first event we ran was a public picnic in a park, from about one o clock to seven. It was a nice day but it got colder in the evening, and while I don't know a lot about reptiles I know they're cold blooded and Dublin at the best of times is not warm enough to sustain them. This girl brought along her iguana (she said it was an iguana, it looked to me like a bearded dragon) and had him on a leash for pretty much the whole day, and then when she joined us for dinner she just put him in a pillowcase so he could go to sleep. She said this is what you're meant to do, I have a hard time believing this.
She also told a story about how she'd brought one of her lizards with her to a convention in England. She was meant to share a room with a guy who bailed out on her and when she left the lizard in the hotel room, it died. She blamed the hotel for keeping the room too cold. Now I found out recently that she gave in her snake to the pet shop while she takes a trip abroad, because her snake is going to lay eggs. While I think this was more responsible than I've seen before, I can't help feeling that the poor thing would be better off at the vet's. We board our cats when we go abroad, I don't think it should be different for reptiles.
This girl has Asperger's Syndrome and a problem with empathy and while I can be understanding I think she's treating her pets disgracefully. Or am I blowing this out of proportion? Is this really the proper way to handle reptiles?
She seems to want to bring her lizards to every event we hold and I want to tell her gently that it's not good for them. Am I in a position to do this?
The first event we ran was a public picnic in a park, from about one o clock to seven. It was a nice day but it got colder in the evening, and while I don't know a lot about reptiles I know they're cold blooded and Dublin at the best of times is not warm enough to sustain them. This girl brought along her iguana (she said it was an iguana, it looked to me like a bearded dragon) and had him on a leash for pretty much the whole day, and then when she joined us for dinner she just put him in a pillowcase so he could go to sleep. She said this is what you're meant to do, I have a hard time believing this.
She also told a story about how she'd brought one of her lizards with her to a convention in England. She was meant to share a room with a guy who bailed out on her and when she left the lizard in the hotel room, it died. She blamed the hotel for keeping the room too cold. Now I found out recently that she gave in her snake to the pet shop while she takes a trip abroad, because her snake is going to lay eggs. While I think this was more responsible than I've seen before, I can't help feeling that the poor thing would be better off at the vet's. We board our cats when we go abroad, I don't think it should be different for reptiles.
This girl has Asperger's Syndrome and a problem with empathy and while I can be understanding I think she's treating her pets disgracefully. Or am I blowing this out of proportion? Is this really the proper way to handle reptiles?
She seems to want to bring her lizards to every event we hold and I want to tell her gently that it's not good for them. Am I in a position to do this?
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Comments
If you are in charge of the event, you are perfectly within your rights to ban her from bringing them.
I remember her. I was at that convention. In my opinion the lizard dying had more to do with it being smuggled into the country stuffed in her bra for almost a day than anything wrong with the hotel room :mad:
I can't really offer advice, but if it were me, yes I would say something. I can't stand back and watch such things. She may well still carry on regardless, but at least you'd have spoken up.
In my opinion the lizard would not die of cold in a hotel room in one day/night unless the temperature was low enough to be too cold for a human so she should have complained for her own sake if it was that bad, our snake has escaped a few times and survived just fine at normal room temperature for a few days until she came out of hiding.
All being said, it does sound to me like she's not taking the best care of her animals and if you can I would dissuade / ban her from bringing them in future especially if she does suffer from mental ill health and may not be making the best decisions for the animals herself.
Those of you from other cons, I probably met you guys at one point or another too. I've never run into the girl i'm talking about before though.
but a beardy should be in a box to properly support it - and so it doesn't snag it's claws.
if she has an iguana (which most people mean green iguanas when they say this) they're a dangerous animal to the public due to their tails. and
if she is going to take them here there and everywhere, she should have a mobile temporary set up arranged - a faunarium, towel and heat mat minimum.
this is ignoring the animals possible UV light requirements.
the gravid snake to the pet shop - that's about right, i used to work in a pet shop which did holidays for reptiles, when the clutch was laid, a box was prepared with damp vermiculite in it, the eggs were transferred to this and then placed into an incubator to hatch.
the shops wouldn;t take the animals in if they didn;t know what they were doing, so at least that was a bit of responsible ownership