Starting a reptile sanctuary.

[lsgraulau]

I'm thinking of starting a reptile sanctuary and shelter to at least prevent some people from releasing them into the wild and give educational talks at schools. I've worked with wild caught snakes and turtles so I have a bit of experience in varied ways and can always read up vast amounts of information in a short time if needed.

Any thoughts on how I could make this work?

 

[AFRO-thunder]

Win the lottery. If you do it right, then you will need lots of space, time and an experienced vet, because naturally 99% of unwanted reptiles are sick and/or deformed. Rehabilitation and finding new homes for such animals is extremely difficult and sooner than you want to, you'll have a massive collection of agressive, costly mouths to feed. If you are in Puerto Rico like your Profile says, I would guess that 99% of the shelter's inhabitants would be iguanas.

If you want to educate people I would start something like a website and showroom with some herps on display and lots and lots of information. This way you can focus on teaching people instead of curing sick animals (which is good as well, but way more expensive).

 

[lsgraulau]

Iguanas are no longer kept as pets here. They're mostly a plague here so that solves the possible feed for the carnivorous reptiles

I was thinking starting with snakes and putting them in racks and turtles to be placed in pens on my backyard and later on if I get more space I could move on to other types of reptiles.

 

[coura]

Are people willing to give you unwanted specimens of turtles and snakes? Iguanas dont make a fine dining for many snakes and for me I find unetical to kill such magnificent creature to use as food for other reptiles. Its even legal for you to start such endeavor?

 

[lsgraulau]

If they're willing to "set them free" I'm pretty sure they wouldn't mind giving it to someone who they know would take good care of it.

On the iguana thing: When talking about food I don't mix in ethics since what is done for survival excludes ethics from my point of view. I do agree that they are magnificent animals but when they start becoming a plague and endangering endemic species a line has to be drawn. I know they don't make good feed so that's why I was planning on breeding rats to feed the snakes.

 

[coreyweinkoetz]

I know of about a 10,000 mistreated redearsliders you can have .
but snakes really are not a problem to rehome easly so if you want to really help stick with the real problems like the iguana's or the redear's they are the reptiles of adoption concern.

or better yet to help the reptiles of the world take in all the stray cats heck if you want you can even feed them to your snakes I wont tell anyone.

 

[coreyweinkoetz]

use the iguanas and cats to feed the homeless just a thought . send the food to Haiti they could use the help send them some tree's to I heard they clear cut the whole island greedy humans