Why should I care about what you think? I don’t. I generally avoid you. I see your name pop up on my daily scroll, groan, roll my eyes. My thumb reflexively switches to turbo, flicking past the bold headlines until I land on John DaVore, or someone whose words are worth spending 5 minutes with. Like me, you’re just one of a ca-jillion people bloviating on an online platform for the same reason my dog licks his balls: because you can. But you never seem to have much to say about anything, aside from giving the people who stumble into your foxhole the finger. Your message is consistent: “anyone who thinks they can tell me what to do, or what I can own or what I can do with what I own is a woke SJW libtard antifa PETA CRT communist fill-in-the-blank. "

Why should you or any zoo owner care about what I think? I don't know. You're probably asking the wrong question though. It's clear you don't care about what I think any more than the people who insist it's their god-given right to own military style assault rifles care about what I think because, Second Amendment. End of Convo. You’re not writing your opinion pieces because you care about what I think. You’ve found your niche audience in the exotic pet trade, and you have no interest in hearing from anyone who may offer a counterpoint, or at the very least provide context for some of the statements you make based on your own personal narrative that ignores the grim reality of how many of these zoos, roadside or otherwise operate. If you had genuine interest in providing context that transcended your personal experiences and desires, you would include commentary from ethologists, scientists, ecologists, conservationists – all the expert “ists” who have dedicated their careers and adult lives to studying cause and effect, collecting data, proving theories based on facts, not feelings. But from everything I’ve read, you seem to only be interested in justifications, not acknowledgement of impact or consequence.

You conveniently ignore the ecological devastation caused by exotic reptiles and amphibians when you insist on your god-given right to own exotic pets. Most people have heard about the Burmese python and the Argentine Tegu, but scientists have identified upward of 60 non-native species in Florida (this is just the number of species they’ve been able to identify, not the total number of invasive species that is nearly triple) – the incubator epicenter that allows some of these species to flourish, destroy habitat, consume the young of native species. And migrate. They are inexorably migrating, marching north, encouraged by warming temperatures. You’re a responsible exotic pet owner. Therefore, you seem to suggest that curbing, monitoring, or regulating the exotic pet trade is an infringement on your liberties - part of the SJW PETA WOKE ANTIFA HRC SOROS Radical Left agenda.

You went straight to, I should remove myself from the conversation because I hate zoos, skipping over the creamy filling in the middle. That’s as lame as the people firing off angry missives to Medium upper management because they were infuriated by something they read and demanded the writer be cancelled.

Not all zoos are created equal. Here in DC, the National Zoo is one of the finest in the world. I used to live in a building at the end of a block perched right above the zoo. In the morning, you could hear the howler monkeys calling to each other. In the dead of winter, I would take refuge in the Amazon Rainforest exibit where it was always a balmy 85 degrees. Years ago, I visited the Artis Zoo in Amsterdam – top notch, as was the San Diego Zoo.

But that was a long time ago. Now, all zoos depress me, regardless of how well they are maintained or how high a quality of life they provide. I’ve never kidded myself about animals in the wild living these great lives: for most, whether predator or prey, life is short and brutal. What depresses me about zoos is the absence of the wild – the fact that the wild is diminishing exponentially, until we inevitably reach a near future where only zoos remain – like museums stocking rare collections of species that were pushed to extinction in the wild.