Hi saulius—thanks for those thoughts (and for your previous work on this issue).
Re pet stores, that could also be an impactful way to go, although a few considerations suggest to me it might not be as impactful. Many of the reptile stores that sell large amounts of mice seem to be small local businesses, not large companies with brands they’d want to protect. There are some international pet companies like PetCo that sell rodents, but I don’t think their volume is that big. Also, many of the smaller pet stores specialize in reptiles, so perhaps people who shop at those stores would have a sense of what’s going on and not be so upset by it, whereas people that go to zoos probably don’t think at all about how the animals are fed. I agree with your point about auditing, I think there’s still more work to do in figuring out exactly what change you’d ask for.
It’s definitely possible that lots of rodents are fed to other types of animals, particularly birds of prey, although it’s not something that came up much in our research. The UK report at the very end talks about this a lot, which I found somewhat surprising. I don’t have a good sense of how much this might change our estimates.
The point about average age is something we indeed thought about a lot and asked a few industry people about this. For example, rodent imports are reported by weight, so we tried to estimate the average size of the rodents to figure out how many rodents were being imported. We ended up estimating that the average mouse was a “fuzzy” or “small” which would make them 5-21 days old. For rats it was “pups” and “weaned” which would make them 14-28 days old. I think these were just gut estimates though, so could be wrong.
I appreciate the kind words, although to avoid taking too much credit I should say that this research was conducted under the umbrella of an existing organization, although we elected to not publish under the name of that organization for various reasons :)
Hi saulius—thanks for those thoughts (and for your previous work on this issue).
Re pet stores, that could also be an impactful way to go, although a few considerations suggest to me it might not be as impactful. Many of the reptile stores that sell large amounts of mice seem to be small local businesses, not large companies with brands they’d want to protect. There are some international pet companies like PetCo that sell rodents, but I don’t think their volume is that big. Also, many of the smaller pet stores specialize in reptiles, so perhaps people who shop at those stores would have a sense of what’s going on and not be so upset by it, whereas people that go to zoos probably don’t think at all about how the animals are fed. I agree with your point about auditing, I think there’s still more work to do in figuring out exactly what change you’d ask for.
It’s definitely possible that lots of rodents are fed to other types of animals, particularly birds of prey, although it’s not something that came up much in our research. The UK report at the very end talks about this a lot, which I found somewhat surprising. I don’t have a good sense of how much this might change our estimates.
The point about average age is something we indeed thought about a lot and asked a few industry people about this. For example, rodent imports are reported by weight, so we tried to estimate the average size of the rodents to figure out how many rodents were being imported. We ended up estimating that the average mouse was a “fuzzy” or “small” which would make them 5-21 days old. For rats it was “pups” and “weaned” which would make them 14-28 days old. I think these were just gut estimates though, so could be wrong.
I appreciate the kind words, although to avoid taking too much credit I should say that this research was conducted under the umbrella of an existing organization, although we elected to not publish under the name of that organization for various reasons :)