Reptile Fight Club - Captive Equivalence as a Welfare Standard w/ Billy Sveen

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

In this episode, Justin and Rob discuss captive equivalence as a welfare standard w/ Billy SveenWho will win? You decide. Reptile Fight Club!Billy Sveen-https://www.instagram.com/creepersherpetoculture/Billy’s paperhttps://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f99c047fa9ceb071696ee9a/t/67ec2f45295d144305dc58f1/1743531845626/V7.1_001_Opinion_Sveen.pdf?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bioFollow Justin Julander @Australian Addiction Reptiles-http://www.australianaddiction.comIG https://www.instagram.com/jgjulander/Follow Rob @ https://www.instagram.com/highplainsherp/Follow MPR Network @FB: https://www.facebook.com/MoreliaPythonRadioIG: https://www.instagram.com/mpr_network/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtrEaKcyN8KvC3pqaiYc0RQSwag store: https://teespring.com/stores/mprnetworkPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/moreliapythonradio

All right, welcome to Reptile Fight Club. My name is Justin Jew Lender, in case you're new here. And with me is Rob Stone, my faithful co-host. How are you doing, sir? I'm doing great. I'm excited for this. I'm excited to be in a sequence of things we have really planned out. It looks really promising for the first quarter.

So, yeah, I'm excited. Yeah, yeah, good times. And we've got our good friend, Billy Sveen, back on the podcast. It's always great to have him on. Welcome, welcome back. Happy to be here. Thanks for being on the show. Yeah.

Always fun. Yeah. I was very excited by the message this morning from Keith and regarding a certain something. Gavin's new paper. So it has been officially published. So we can talk about it. Yeah.

I looked it up and it's on the journal website. And so it's. Very cool. Yeah. formerly, formally describing a new species in the Varanus Glowerdai, the Kimberly Rock Monitor Complex. So kind of a cool thing. And this one's really kind of, it's a little, I'm really excited to kind of chat more with Gavin and read, you know, read the article a little more thoroughly. I kind of glanced at it. I was, had a busy day of reviewing abstracts for

an upcoming meeting, but it was, so I, but yeah, it was kind of interesting. But, So it describes the new species Varanis Fifei, named after Fife. Yeah, Fifi. Named after Greg Fife, right? That's the name there. I'm terrible with names, but I think I do remember Greg Fife's name. He worked in Alice Springs, I believe, as like wildlife biologist. That seems to be what's coming to mind.

I guess I should have looked that out. But anyway, so named after him. But this is a fairly limited area where these are found. And they're fairly close to a population that they're referring to as eastern glowertai that are in Kaminara area. Now, this is exciting to me because I was just there. I saw the eastern form. I went and looked for Phi Phi Phi Phi, but I was not able to find one. This was the, if anybody remembers my account of the trip there, this was after I dropped you guys off the airport and I headed out further west over to Kununurah.

And on my way out of Kununera, I stopped at Keep River, that national park there. And that's kind of the center of their range, I guess, you might say. And it was ridiculously hot. But that was the most miserable night of car camping or trying to sleep in a tent. I tried to sleep in the tent for a while, but every hour or so I'd wake up just blasting heat on trying to sit in the car, turn on the AC, revive myself a little bit, try to sleep again in the tent. It was not a good night. I was the only one there, and there was a good reason for that. I think they probably should have just closed the place down.

But it was nice to see the area. It was a really cool place. had these insane palm trees that were really, really tall and very thin and, you know, had the leaves up top. It was pretty cool. Some natural palm variants out there. And then the rock and, you know, it was just a beautiful area. Didn't see too many reptiles. I think it was just hot and dry.

And then I, instead of trying to sleep, I probably should have gone out herping. But at this time, at this point, I was pretty, pretty worn out after two weeks. of intense herping. So the heat and the exhaustion got to me. So I drove to Catherine and got a hotel room for the, which was probably a good thing because it dumped rain that night. So I escaped the rain and got a good night's sleep. I also went out herping, got a couple olive pythons, a blackheaded python in that area. So it was, I guess, probably a good move. But it would have been nice to see a Phi Phi to tick that off my list before it was a species. But, Yeah. So anyway, kind of a cool, cool thing to wake up to see that paper had been published and Gavin was nice enough to send a copy of the paper to us to check out. So check it out.

Zoo taxes is the journal. So if you're interested. And apparently there's more forthcoming, you know, resolving this east and west and things like that. And then obviously the Kakadu, glowered eye, that's another one that's been kind of the big question mark for a long time. And why are they in Glowardye when they're separated by thousands of miles? Well, maybe not. Maybe that's a little over-exaggeration. But pretty cool. So more veranid species. Yay. Just more to find.

I think that's one of the pythons and vranids are kind of my main targets when I go to Australia. I'd like to see all of those if I can. Yeah. Well, a neferers, too, I'd imagine. Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, geckos are pretty high on the list, too. But there's so many. Yeah, Neferus, you know, breaks it down a little easier.

I can definitely find all the species in neferrous. But, yeah, all the geckos would be a huge challenge. Right. All right. Well, what's going on with you guys? Yeah, mostly the same here. You know, just busy with work heading into the new year and all. As I say, excited for this show.

The last show we did, this show is going forward. So that's really good. Otherwise, you know, starting to get into logistics for trips and things, which is exciting. Book to ticket this past week, which is good. So, yeah, just sort of coming out, we're on the backside, right, of our winter doldrums. So getting excited for it. Yeah, I'm definitely excited for spring. I wish I were in Australia.

right now, herping. That would be much more preferable to sitting out the winter in northern Utah, but good stuff. And then I've got a conference over in Prague. So since Heidi was nice enough to let me go to Australia for my 50th birthday, I'm going to take her on a little European vacation for her 50th. So trying to let her plan out what she wants to do, what she wants to see. At first, we were going to drive all the way to England or fly over to England and see, you know, England and Scotland and all that kind of stuff. But she's like, there's so many cool things close to Prague. Why don't we just stay in the area and do, you know, all the stuff in kind of Germany and Czech, Chechchia and all that good stuff. So, yeah, I didn't realize they were calling it Chechchia.

Yeah. But, yeah, I thought it was just Czech Republic. But, yeah, the maps say Chechia. So I don't know when they made that change. But, yeah. So Nipper's like, isn't that, and like a former Russian, I'm like, I don't know. I just looked on the map and Prague is in Chechnya. Oh, Chechnya, of course. Yeah. There we go. Yeah. Good times. Well, Billy, how about you? What have you been up to lately? From reptiles-wise, I kind of got the dart frogs all shut down so they're not really breeding anymore for the winter, which is good. I have these little like a dactylose gactylose. goes that I reproducing like crazy. Like I pulled out some of the tubes of eggs and I lost count at 25 because of how the legs are stacked up over the top of each other.

I got behind with my schedule of how I was planning on building a big six foot enclosure that I was going to release these into. And so they'll have plenty of space eventually. I just don't have it ready yet. Right. But yeah. So now I've been making up all these like extra. one gallon enclosures for this like some army of tiny little micro gecko.

Wow, they're so small too. They're absolutely tiny. Yeah. I think I've, that was like a big test before I moved them into this big custom enclosure is can I build it in such a way that it's escape proof? Right. And for the for the babies because I'm not going to be able to get them reliably out of that enclosure.

Right, right. And so there's going to be eggs who knows where. But they, I can, with my building materials, I can keep them contained. So I feel pretty good about that. Cool. But I, yeah, that's kind of been keeping me busy. And then without getting political at all, Minneapolis is crazy right now. And so that's been keeping me plenty busy.

And so that's part of the reason why I'm behind on everything. but yeah it's a it's a busy place yeah I'm sorry to hear yeah it's not fun to deal with for sure yeah it's becoming a lot more important to drive neighbors around and bring them groceries than it is to uh you know make sure the reptiles are fed but uh you know I'm not doing too much more other than that shoot yeah well yeah it's the times we're living in seems times we're living in yeah Yeah. Well, yeah, I got a couple more of my pygmy pythons to eat, so that's exciting. It seems like they like brained, you know, frozen thawed pinks. And that seems to work pretty well. So at least after a few mouse legs. And by a few, I mean, very many. But they've, I was surprised. Like, I just kind of teased them, put it in front. of them and they eventually took. So, yeah, hopefully they'll all be going here very soon. I think I only have one or two holdouts that just refuse and get that thing out of my face kind of attitude. But, yeah.

So things are moving in the right direction there. Speaking of getting things, you know, feeding things, that's always a joy when you need to assist feed them. Maybe that plays into our conversation tonight. because, you know, this limited feed, feed, you know, food species and prey items. Yeah. Yeah, it can be a little bit of a limiting factor in our hobby. Yeah. Yeah. If only someone had an army of tiny little geckos that they just needed to get rid of. No.

Right. It might be too small even to be food items. Yeah. I've tried that. I've tried to get colonies of a couple different, you know, part of the way. ethnogenic geckos and I just like them too much. I don't want to feed them to my snakes. That's kind of a tricky thing too.

Would those snakes eat something like that? That's all? Yeah, I imagine. I had binoes geckos and they range throughout Australia. So, you know, they have a very wide range and they would definitely overlap with pygmy python. So I imagine they would recognize them as a food source and spray. I did have a hatchling, coriolophis, a crested gecko that didn't thrive and ended up passing.

And so I fed that to a, or I tried to feed that to a snake, but nobody wanted to take it. So I don't know if it was the fact that it was dead or if it was, you know, they just like don't recognize it as a prey species because it's on an island, many, many thousands of miles away. Fair enough. Yeah. But I don't know.

I've heard accounts of people using, you know, small geckos for feeders and with great success. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I don't know how great I am at breeding geckos and producing a lot of geckos. So I bred a few species, but not at huge numbers by any means. Yeah. Yeah. And certainly.

Oh, he kind of froze up there. Oh, there you are. Sorry, what were you saying, Rob? I've had good success beating wild brown and holes. Although, in light of the pentastone situation and all that conversation, that's probably not necessarily something to continue pursuing. Captive bread would probably be an okay alternative, but the time scales on that. Right, yeah. I bet those are like 10 to 20 times.

is bigger than my geckos. Right. The adults are probably the mass of a medium cricket, you know, in a longer shape. And the babies are significantly smaller. Yeah. And these are the Williams Eye? No, they're Conraoi, Conroy. I don't know how people will say it.

Cameroon Dwarf Gecko. Okay. They're about half to two-thirds of the length. and so significantly smaller by mass. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. They're...

Wow. They're small. Yeah. The adults are about the size of my pinky, including their tail. Okay. Yeah, that's very, very small. Yeah. And I guess, I mean, they're aptly named, Dwarf gecko.

Yeah. Do they... What are you feeding them? Fruit flies. Okay. And the hatchlings can take down a fruit fly, no problem. Yeah, and then there's lots of springtails and some small isopods in there, but they eat fruit flies. And I always have some gecko mix in there, and they definitely spend time around it and they eat the fruit flies out of it because the fruit flies congregate around it.

It kind of makes the feeding areas. Yeah. But I can't say I've ever seen them go and independently eat that, which is what I hear from other people have more experience with them. that they're the vast majority of the nutrition they're taking is uh insects okay okay yeah i guess if you're doing dart frogs you might as well have yeah i mean that's the whole thing's eating fruit flies yeah it's very easy for me yeah right yeah all right well um you've had a paper published recently i did yeah yeah why don't you maybe tell us a little bit about it and sure process and where you submitted it and how the

Yeah, the process was, I mean, kind of started with me having a relationship with other podcasters, particularly Roy Arthur Blodgett and Dylan Perrin. I remember just when I started listening to podcasts, probably like 2021,

early 2020, yeah, 2021, and then going into 2022 when it's, or more too. I was hearing people talk about things I was interested in, especially with my other background in medical bioethics. And so I like to think about the why behind the things that we do and what the justification is.

And so I found myself, depending on people present themselves on some of these podcasts, messaging them. And so I would comment back and give feedback to Dylan a lot. And then I heard Roy, I think, like probably lizard brain and reached out to him and kept on having him back and forth. And so then I, yeah, it's 2021 because that's when I bought our house. And so I had the ability to expand the collection. I was thinking, how do I do this in what I consider like an ethical way? And so I remember sending Roy and Dylan and a few other people like a list of ideas, like rules for myself.

and I didn't think they were anything special. I just don't think they're like that remarkable. I think a lot of people have similar ideas. But writing it down was potentially not what a lot of people do. And so that sparked me going on to Roy and Phil's podcast. That was a few years ago now. And then in talking with them, if you listen to that, that's the first podcast I was on.

listen to it, I don't talk about my academic background at all because I felt like, I still felt like very much an imposter. Like, no one should be listening to me. I don't have any expertise or anything worth mentioning as a person with like one snake and a couple of dart frogs at that time. And I don't have very much more than that now. But that kind of encouraged me that I do have potentially something to say. And actually talking with you and talking, Justin and talking with Zach about what it's like to have an academic job. And then use your academic skills to push into your hobby a bit with you doing some virology work related to night of virus.

Zach really reframing a lot of his job around like herpetology and zoo science. And then realizing that my boss was pretty receptive to that, decided to try to just write a paper on reptile ethics. So I decided to address this idea of what would it be, people always talk about like what's the minimum standard. And as gross as a lot of people's gut reaction to that is, as far as like, oh, I want to get away from the minimum. I want to do the maximum.

I want to, the minimum is here. I want to run to the other side. That's like a lot of the stuff you see, especially on, you know, like Facebook forums, for example. Right, right. Yeah. But it's still, it's a useful concept because if we can't define a minimum, then we can't define abuse and we can't define standards by which people should be expected to do something, right?

And so we can't define the point at which you're exploiting an animal for profit versus you are maybe not doing something that I would do, but I think. think it's still reasonable to, you know, minimize your overhead price so that you can have, you know, profitable company because you do this full time, right? So what I think that idea of a minimal standard is incredibly useful to be able to talk about. And often online, it gets reduced to size. You know, like tub size, cage size versus a little size. Exactly. Yeah. Oh, that can fit in this size of a rack or, you know, the joke of like how many poison frogs can I put in the 20 gallon tank? And like, we can put hundreds, but they just won't last very long, you know?

Right. I think we, you know, in the in the 90s and early 2000s, I think we are kind of sold a false bill of goods that, you know, the end goal is to get as many as you can and as little space as you can, you know, and being, you know, some of these big breeders and their giant rows of racks and just being like, oh, that's, that's the ultimate. And that's what we strive for, you know, it's like, no, that's not what we should be striving for. That's kind of like, bombing or, you know, like, yeah. And I don't have a ton of experience by the numbers, but I've been keeping reptiles and

paying attention since the late 90s. And so I remember when the minimum for Bearder Dragon was, people were arguing it should be a 40 gallon. Right. You know? And because a lot of people weren't doing that. Yeah. And now it needs to be a 4x2 by 2 by 2, but a lot of people are saying it needs to be

significantly bigger than that. And I'm not saying that any of those are right or wrong necessarily. It's just like what's the standard by which you can actually address that? And so that was the kind of the question back my mind. So I didn't want to make an objective set of rules. I think there are some places that have done a fairly good job of that. But if you read it, they have an underlying philosophy about the natural

life of the animal that isn't just, well, just because a snake is four foot long, the case you should be four foot long. They talk about why. And so I decided that I would go about trying to explore like an ethical, logical argument for that. And I started with the idea that it's possible for reptiles and amphibians to suffer and to have well-being. Like those are things, there's a conscious or maybe not, you could argue consciousness, we don't need to get there, a sentient,

like they feel something. There's something that they feel, something that they experience. It's something that it's like to be a snake. And so therefore they can suffer, therefore they can have well-being. Right. I saw just off-hand,

I saw a movie trailer. I can't remember what the movie was, but it was a, it was a bear was eating a beaver or something, you know, and like, and another beaver, like, rescued him or pulled him out. And the, the, the, the, the beaver that was being eaten was like, what are you doing? He caught me. That's how this works. You know, he was, I'm fine to be food. And then, and then he's like, what? Yeah. Yeah. Do you want to, do you want to go ahead and eat me? And the bear's like, no, it's weird now. This, you know, that's awesome.

Yeah. I want to watch that. Kind of a, kind of an interesting. take on it, you know, like animals may know they're, okay, I'm, I'm prey for, you know, like, I'm not going to fight this. It's going to happen. Yeah. Well, you mentioned that quite a bit, right? In the context of the length of suffering or the capacity, right, at the length of time that this can go on in a while, there's probably going to be lessened because they'll just become prey. And that's probably a pretty instantaneous reaction. And you also hit on, you know, this goes back to, there's a book, um, uh, why don't zebras have ulcers? Right. It's the same concept that like they don't have a nest. They're not sitting there with a perpetual dread that they're going to be pray for something. It just sort of happens and it's done.

There's no chronic disease of worry. Exactly right. Right. Like like a human would experience if they knew they were prey for something that was, it could be around any corner. Yeah. And just be like some people would just kind of give up and go, well, if I'm going to be pray, I might as well just be pray now instead. Yeah. at some indeterminate point that makes me worry about it. And other people are like, no, I'm going to fight tooth and claw to get away, you know. And that plays perfectly into the next point of that, although you want to avoid suffering that's unnecessary, it's impossible in a living environment to avoid all suffering. Suffering is a necessary part of life. And so the argument that I make is that if you can keep an animal captivity,

well, the next step, I guess, would be that, an animal experiencing suffering but continuing to live in the wild is a life worth living. And I think that's a lot of people, the vast majority of people, that's common sense. And so if in captivity, we can have a standard of well-being and a lack of suffering that is similar or equivalent to that of the animal in the wild that is experiencing some suffering, not zero suffering, some suffering. Right. Then that's an okay minimum standard.

Okay. Yeah, because like you said, I mean, they're in your paper that there's, there's organizations out there that don't think any reptiles should be kept in captivity. Yeah. They don't think any animals should be kept unless they're domesticated or companion animals. They're comparing it to a non-existence animal. Yeah. I love that.

I love it in there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, well, yeah, I think let's get into this and we'll do it in our style of a fight, you know.

We'll try to kind of pit, pit each, you know, or find the two sides that we can discuss. And I believe maybe, what would we say for the two sides here? I'm not having a brain fart here. I mean, I think there's probably lots of the areas we could get into, but potentially, a big crux of the argument is can we make it so captivity is better than the wild for animals? Do animals can, you know, are my dark frogs better off in their enclosure than they are in the Amazon is potentially a way we could go about it? And then if we get on signed tangents, I'm sure that will be fine too.

Yeah, yeah, sounds good. All right. Well, thank you for putting that. Sometimes it's difficult to find, you know, the pro and con or the two sides. Yeah. Do our captive animals benefit compared to the wild counterparts. Perfect. Okay. Well, Rob and I will do a coin toss real quick to see who gets the privilege of discussing this with you. Tales. It is heads. I'm feeling it. I'll go with this one if that's all right.

I'm sure of course you chime in and moderate. There you go. All right, Billy, what do you call? Heads. It is tails. Man, I'm a double winner this week. I'm kind of curious to see, you know, where you come in on the counter argument. So I'm going to have you take that side.

And I will say that animals, wait, I guess, yeah, animals can benefit from being in captivity. So you would be the, nah, they're saying that, yeah, that we're not doing animals of service by, they should be free. Right. Essentially. Well, shoot, maybe I'm rethinking that. Do I want to take the other one? I don't know. What do you,

what do you prefer? No, take your initial impulse. Let's go with that. Okay. Okay, let's go with that. And then we can come by ya

instead of fight at some point too, I'm sure. Yeah, of course. Yeah, as we get, the, the critics out there saying we don't fight enough.

Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Oh, you're going to get it, Billy. All right. All right.

Well, I'm going to check you and let you kind of go first. Yeah. I mean, I would, say that if you look at the like some of the main ways that we talk about comparing standards of welfare, there's a few different ways that you can assess it, but one of the ways is that people often talk about is like the five domains.

And so let's see if I can remember off the top of my head. It's like, I have them if you want. Yeah, good nutrition, good environment, good health, appropriate behavior. and positive mental experiences. Yeah. And so especially, like, so if you think about captivity as, um,

uh, confined and constrained environment, no matter what type of like eternal spring you can make it, you are dramatically limiting their responses and their availability to get things. And so if we have, you know, even 10 different food items, how can that compare to the nutrition of the wild? If I have to supplement my poison dart frogs with vitamins every single feeding in order for them to reproduce and produce viable eggs, they're not getting any of that vitamin dusting in the wild. the environment in the wild,

like how many times do we have animals that do poorly because we get their environmental parameters slightly off, especially when we're trying to keep them in somewhat small spaces. Compared to in the native environment, they've evolved to be there for millions of years. And so you can't top it. and the animals, yes, lots of animals die in the wild, but the animals that survive are usually pretty amazing specimens.

Like they might be lean, they might not look like the nice, robust, somewhat lazy animals that we might have in captivity. So they might look foreign to us, but they're, they're true survivors. And so, you know, is that thing that we could even

replicate in captivity? And there's all kinds of animals that we have in captivity that we think we're doing a good job by that. They can't replicate most of their natural behaviors. Like, I would, you know,

the vast majority, like my snake doesn't have, even though it spends most of the time in the borough, it does sometimes climb, and I can't really, replicate that very well. It does sometimes swim, and I don't even have the ability for it to really fully submerge itself very well. Right. And all of that, all of those things combined together to be positive mental experiences, which I guess I don't need to touch on right now.

That can be later. But if we're not meeting those, the positive mental experiences also can't come from it. Right, right. And, you know, I agree. I don't think there's anybody that could say that we can make an equivalent of what they would experience in the wild in our boxes, in our houses, you know. And I laugh every time somebody says, oh, look at my arboreal cage. It's, you know, four feet tall. You're like arboreal. I mean, that's even better.

There's some comments that I've seen on Poisonedart Frog groups where they talk about the orientation of an enclosure for thumbnails, like the tiny little guys. Yeah. And so they'll be like, it needs to be like a minimum will be like a 12 by 12 by 18, like 12 by 18. Yeah. All. But, you know, you should have it in 18 by 18 by 24 or something like that. Right.

So this person had like, I don't remember. It was big like three foot by 18 by 20. It's like a weird size or 18 or something. So it was wider than it is tall. But the tall, the height of it was still. It was taller than what people usually think it was the minimum, but it wasn't the right orientation. Right. So it wasn't arboreal.

Yeah. And it was inappropriate for the frogs. Right. It's like, ah! Yeah. And then you see like, none of this is canopy. Yeah. You see a nature documentary of a strawberry poisoned art frog climbing a 30 foot tree to deposit an infertile egg for its tadpoles.

And it's going to do that tomorrow. Yeah. And it does it. Yeah. How many times a day and how many days in a row? and like, you're like, yeah, there's nothing that's going to equilibrate. And I think I think it was Ryan Young that kind of turned me onto this with the green tree pythons.

He said it's easier to get a good thermal gradient in a, you know, a wider cage versus a tall cage. Yeah. And so and also, you know, giving the green tree for green tree pythons as an example, you know, of an arboreal species that, that move a lot in the wild, you know, periodically like They'll move up and down a tree, you know, to come down into ambush position, then go back up for the daytime. And so they're climbing that tree up day and, you know, day and day out, basically until they get a meal. And so, you know, to replicate that, you know, how many laps do they need to take around a four foot cage, you know, regardless of the orientation? Right.

And so he, his thought was, you know, if they have a wider thermal gradient, that'll mean they might be more active. or if you're not feeding them constantly, they're going to be more active, and so they're going to be moving like they would in nature. And I've always kind of struggled a little bit with, like, ambush predators, like pythons that can sit in the same spot for weeks or months,

or there was a study that showed a Darwin carpet python in the botanical gardens that sat in the same tree for a year, you know, like, or just under a year, you know. So they can stay in the same place for a very long time. Are they sitting there going, oh, I'm bored. I don't, you know, I don't have any way.

If you meet all their needs in a, in, and say a confined captive environment, are they any worse off than they would be sitting in a tree hollow for a year? You know, like, are we, are we being too precious with our idea of what the wild is? And another, I guess, example of, you know, and this, this relates to the stress or the idea that things are going to eat me. You know, I had some Rankin's dragons, you know, little mini bearded dragon cousins and, you know, had them in an enclosure in my house or in my reptile room. And once in a while, they take them outside to get them some sun.

And man, the transition was like a switch. You put them outside and they were like looking up at the sky. They're bearding out at me. Like they're freaking out, like, which they do not do in their enclosure. Yeah. Because all of a sudden, I don't know if it's. it's the UV or the sky above them or, you know,

whatever is turning them on saying, okay, I need to be defensive. I need to be worried out here because something could eat me, you know, something, because when I go into their cage, they'll walk over and climb onto my hand or they're not,

they're not bearding out. They're not freaking out. But when I take them outside, put them in a similar situation, they are freaking out. They are bearding out. So, you know,

and whether or not that, that stress is a good stress, you know, maybe, maybe that's important for them or, you know, that kind of thing. So I think they're, they're, they at least recognize whether consciously or subconsciously that when they're in their, you know, enclosure in my reptile room, they don't have to worry about predation. Yeah. So, you know, is that, is that an example of, you know, captivity being, you know, more, I guess, better for them in that regard where they don't have to worry about predation? they don't have to worry about that. Is that a plus for the captive environment, I guess, is kind of my argument there.

With the constrained freedom comes some safety. Right, right. That's almost like a fundamental point that you define in the paper, right, is that in almost every one of those domains, the wild has endless variety, but there's an appurtenant threat that is associated with all of that variety that probably is not present within our country. captive context for the most, or it could appear differently. I would say the other thing, too, just from when you had initially started talking, is it's almost like there's a paradigmatic difference between when we're talking about it in terms

of the wild condition. We're talking about selection occurs on a species level, right, or a population level as an organism, whereas in our box, we're talking about a particular animal. And so it's almost like there's a different viewpoint or lens that we're using when we talk about it in the context of a specific animal, and it's sort of, rate of survival within our condition, or if we're talking about the wild and we're, you keep saying, well, yeah, the species as a whole, right? But that's, if we're looking at it on that same lens of as being comprised of those

different individuals, that selection plays out differently. I think this is fascinating. And it definitely is like a bit tangential to what I proposed as like the main argument, but it's a thing that I haven't think about about. So I'm going to dive into it. Like, I think the two main arguments, against, like, in my paper, one of them I bring up in, I think I combat relatively well, is the idea that nature isn't an effective moral agent.

And so just because only natural doesn't mean it's good, that's a naturalistic fallacy. So, you know, just because animals survive in such a way and thrive in such a way, if they're out there killing other animals and being predators, does that mean we need to entertain that as good? And so we should replicate that. Right. So I, and I feel like I wrestle with that reasonably well, but a related aspect of that, is that

animals experiencing the suffering in the wild isn't good in and of itself. It's good as being part of the system. Right.

You know, it's good because it's their population surviving and it's part of a habitat. And so I think someone could say exactly what you're

pointing out, Rob, like I don't care about the individual bearded dragon that's getting predated and worried about predation out there. I care about the fact

that survive and I care about the fact that those that don't survive are making the system work, making an ecosystem thrive. And so when you remove an animal out of that, we're not even talking about the same thing. And that's, I don't have an effective argument against that except to say that that's a different value system. And I think that that's an okay thing for someone, I think it's valid for someone to to have that belief.

And then that's a person that probably doesn't want pets. I don't know. You know, like, I disagree. Like, I, I, I'm really interested in the individual in the wild as well as the population. I see the impact of the population of the animal, or the animal population. And not even the whole population, but just the ecosystem, like much broader than that. What one single species does for an entire environment. So I think that is a weak.

that you're comparing a population in the context of a unfathomably complex system to a single individual isolated in captivity. I don't think it's insert. I don't think it's like a knife in the heart to the argument, but I do think it's something that we can't effectively counter. It's just like a different moral intuition, maybe. I'm not sure. Do you have thoughts?

on that? That is a good question. You know, the individual versus the, and I guess, you know, we can, you know, if we're looking at it through our own lens, you know, if I go out in the field and I find an animal, that individual, to me, represents its species and represents, you know, what's out there and those kind of things. So I guess from that aspect, like, I'm, I'm interacting with the individual on that plane. But yeah, in regards to the species as a whole, do even, you know, the animals that we keep in captivity, once we take them out of the wild, they basically cease to be that species because they don't have the same pressures. They're not biologically functional anymore. Right, right. And so even if we reproduce them and sell them around the world, you know, then we call them, oh, these are pure jungle carpets or whatever, you know, is that a real, real thing? And I mean, there's, there's arguments that could say, no, it's not because once you take it out of the environment,

the selective pressures and of the wild, then it stops being that thing, you know, to some. And I think the clock of domestication starts instantly, but is slow. Sure, sure. And so to say that by two generations or even 50 generations that we've erased millions of years of natural selection, I think is to suggest that like, oh, now the animal can like radically change his diet or having metabolism that doesn't require bolus feeding or doesn't need to lay eggs. I don't know. Like to like, you know, make those types of things to be ridiculous. So say that like a poison dart frog doesn't want to explore leaf litter.

Like we're never going to get away from that, you know, or to say like, or maybe we could. but like that would be kind of cool. That would like change what it is to be there. Yeah. And so to compare it to, because people, some people want to keep up a poison dark frog with like a pond or they'll want all this moss everywhere. But really what they want is like a bag of leaves, you know?

Yeah. And do the leaves we provide in captivity even give them what they would have in the wild anyway? You know, I think a lot of times we think, oh, I'm making a bioactive enclosure. I'm going to throw a few isopods and put a few leaves in there. And now it's, now it's, now it's, bioactive. Now it's just like nature. But what gives me comfort in the limited times I've seen them in the wild, but then the much bigger time that I've watched videos of them in the wild

is that the way they behave on leaf litter in the Amazon looks very similar to how they behave in the enclosure, you know, right here and right here and right there. They're doing the same things. And so even though some of these are really, many generations removed from the wild, they still have that same evolved behavior and I think we'll probably

always have it. So to me, I'm not saying the nature is a moral agent, but the nature is, the natural history is a compass of what it's going to be like to know that I'm providing the environment for them to have an appropriate well-being. Right.

And I think too, some species are more dependent on having that more naturalistic environment. I think dart frogs are a great example. You know, if you don't have them. I mean, I think they can still, you know, do their thing in a, in a very basic, you know. You can keep them on paper towels.

Right. I mean, certainly, and I've, especially when I'm in. It's just more work, I think, for the. It's way more work. Yeah. Way more work. Right. But, like, if I'm, if I'm inundated with, like, froglets, I'll put them in, like,

deli cups with, um, coffee filters for a few days because then I don't have to worry about like I can get their sizes to you know frogs that are a couple weeks apart coming out of the water um if I put them in a big enclosure I need like separate enclosures but if I keep them in the small enclosures I can get them all to a relative size within like a month and then put them all together right and so I'll do that but yeah you have to change those things out a lot um but there are people that breed a fair on a frog that keep them on filter foam and in sterolite bins. Right, right.

And not, you know, very few plants, if any, or they're all fake plants. Or, you know, like, you need to provide them cover, but it doesn't need to look nice. Right. And it needs to be high humidity without being particularly wet, which is tricky, but not that hard to do if you have the right materials. It doesn't even be that expensive. Filter foam with like some wet leaves, some dry leaves, and inside a sterileight bin with a few holes poked in it.

Like, it'll work. Right. I wouldn't want to do it. Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, that kind of maybe gets to part of the argument or is, you know, a lot of times we're keeping these things in captive environments for our, enjoyment for our interaction, for our, you know, being able to watch them. And, and, and I mean, I think people have different goals. I mean, obviously with the, the morph craze that has,

I might even say plagued us for the last, you know, 20 years. I mean, there's arguments of whether or not we should call the ones who don't carry the mutant gene, you know, like, because they, they have no worth in, in the hobby or whatever. And, you know, that's, that's kind of, as, you know, some of the extremes that we've seen in the hobby and people have maybe even considered doing that, you know, to keep the market strong or, you know, to get the best price out of this or that mutation or whatever, you know. And so is, I think, you know, people's, people's goals in this definitely are different. And for me, I love their natural history. So I want to see, you know, some of that aspect of it. Or I love to see them in the wild. So I want to kind of see

see them every day kind of thing rather than once every 10 years or something for hard to find species. And I think you and I and you two, Rob, are all well aligned on that. I don't think you necessarily have

to be to be a good reptile keeper. Right, right. But I do think, you know, people will describe this as like a selfish endeavor. And I don't, I think there's some, there's a greater truth to that, but that's not the word I would pick. I would say it's human centered or, you know, anthropocentric, that it does focus on our interest, but I think as long as we're not

exploiting the animal, it isn't, selfish isn't the word I would use. You know, I would say that we are, because if we have appropriate respect for the animal, we are, we're using the animal in some way. Yeah. But we use each other all the time, you know, like. And we are spending time and energy and money to keep them happy and healthy or whatever, you know. So if you have any type of input, if you are participating in a capitalist economy, you are being used for a value. And that doesn't mean it's necessarily bad, right? Right, right. In a lot of cases it is.

In a lot of cases it is. But like, I mean, I think a lot of people like to work. You know, that is like a human thing. Sure, sure. Yeah. And so, you know, by me providing the service of the things that I've trained to do, people are using me. If they required me to work twice as much, they would be exploiting me.

Right. And so when I think about my animals, it's like, oh, if I, like my little geckos, like, I think for a while there before I set up two more enclosures for them, I was potentially exploiting them. Or like on the verge of it. Like, there was too many in that enclosure. And I kept on telling myself, oh, it's not going to be very much longer. The population can't grow that fast.

And next thing, you know, like, I can't count them. And so, like, I felt bad about that. But I usually don't feel bad. I usually don't have the sensation that, like, I'm being selfish in this hobby. I have this sensation that I'm switching to your side. I have this sensation that despite the limitations, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's captive confinement, but it's also captive protection. Right.

And captive care and captive interest, you know, that kind of thing where you're motivated, you're passionate about keeping them alive and thriving and doing well. So you can show everybody, hey, look at my beautiful pet and that kind of thing. Or, yeah, give other people the opportunity to work with them. Yeah, even today in the hospital, I work as a physician, as a pediatrician, as a pediatric and I was in the hospital and one of the nurse practitioners I work with was asking me about my animals and a nurse was like, what? And like, it's just like overheard and it was very curious.

And then I was like showing her pictures of poison frogs. I was like, is it legal to keep poisonous frogs? And I was like, well, they're not actually. You know, so you just talk about all these things. And we talked a little bit about like conserving the rainforest. And so, you know, like, and I bet that was a person that was sympathetic to all of that before. So I'm not going to pretend I'm changing the world by any of this. But there's external benefits to this, to participating in her pediculture.

We just have to make sure we're not taking advantage and exploiting the animals to achieve them. Yeah, you don't really care about what you don't experience. You know, if there, if all of a sudden there was a law that said, no more reptiles can be kept in captivity, I think we'd have a huge loss because people wouldn't be able to experience them in that regard. They wouldn't be able to have the joy of watching them thrive or the sorrow of watching them pass because of their neglect or they're not doing it right or not getting something right or having something go wrong that they didn't anticipate. Those kind of things that all play into it. And I think that's what makes us strive to do better or strive to protect them in their natural habitat so that we can one day go see them in the wild or, you know, those kind of things.

I think there's there's a lot of benefits that can come from from us keeping them. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And one of the things that I really liked about your captive equivalent standard idea, right, was sort of your first point of what does it require. And it's studying the natural history of the animal to even engage in the conversation. I do think there's a ton of utility to that. And looking at that through the lens of, hey, should we keep the dragon snakes, right, that are feeding on tadpoles and running water and having these specific condition.

And the idea that this, you know, taking this approach, you're going to have to look at that. That's going to be a much more challenging standard to meet where you're saying, okay, I could satisfy this threshold. Again, even if we're looking at it on a species level or population level, as opposed to that one in the box, and that brings up naturally, right, in the context of those dragon snakes, wild caught animals. And what is, is there a differential in terms of our responsibility to be meeting or exceeding that threshold in the context of wild caught animals if you want to use that as jumping off point? Yeah, I tend to think, so I'll make a comment about like the idea of like a dragon snake or something that like there are animals I think are just better suited for captivity because the tradeoff of the. captive constraints and the captive protection is easier to benefit them. And so I think like ambush predators, it's easier.

Right. Because they probably, I mean, this happened once when I had someone watching my animals where they left the door open for at least two days, but maybe longer. I'm not sure because maybe it was open in between because they were taking care of like a week. but they had been to my house two days before I got home, and I came home, and the door was open on the snake enclosure because one of the doors is like, if you slide it,

it's when it's pulls the other door with it. Right. The snake was in its hide. You know, like it didn't leave. And, you know, I'm not going to replicate that on a nightly basis. But so to some degree, like, and so often, when I see her moving about, I just open the door and let her come out and then she explores and then she stops doing that. And so I feel pretty good about that, but compare that to like an

indigo or, you know, not even like a, not even necessarily a big snake. Like a garage like. Yeah. Like something that's like diurnal and visually oriented and more of a foraging animal. I think it's a lot of why people are like simplified to like lizards or the snakes camp. Right. You know, it's like, because you're simplifying it to an animal that is usually an ambush predator versus an animal that usually is a foraging, a more foraging type animal. But even within lizards, like the difference between a lot of active agammeds is quite

different than like a nocturnal gecko that is much closer to an ambush predator. Right. So I think there are some animals that are just much more suited for captivity. It doesn't mean you can't meet the standard for a reticulated. Python that's like fairly active, massive snake, it's just going to be way harder, harder than even like a Burmese python. Right. That is similarly massive.

But not nearly as hard as like an anaconda because you have to figure out the water, too. But that could also be an easier thing too if you. If you have a pool, yeah. And you're really good at pools. Yeah. But, yeah. So, shoot. Oh, wild-cut animals.

I think I would suggest that the same standard applies and that it's just much harder to me. And so if you are taking out like a sub-adult or adult animal that is like, you know, conservatively the 1 in 20 that survived, but maybe like the 100, 1 in 1,000 that survived to that spot, depending on what kind of animal you're talking about. Right? Because to have a stable population,

of an animal over a long course of time, every reproducing pair needs to be replaced by just one reproducing pair. It doesn't mean that no other adults survive. They don't survive to reproduce. They might be around and not reproduce. So if you're talking about bullfrogs that are producing thousands, their survival rate is dismal. You know, if you're talking about a snake that only lays a few clutches

probably across their lives and they clutches are single digits. You know, now that's a much higher number, but it's still really low, really low percentage of survival. So if you're going to pluck the animal out that is, you know, their lived experience is to fight to survive in this world. And they're already adapted. There's the idea of adapted to a natural environment that you, that is genetically programmed. but then there's also like the learned behaviors that we know animals have. And so it's pretty clear that animals have a different stress level just by being born in captivity or stress tolerance. And so I think, you know, how many times do you hear that like this animal will nose rub or do all these things if we have it in a open container or a transparent container?

And so people have like blackout windows and limited visibility. but then their offspring don't do that. And so I think the standard for keeping not all, but probably a lot of wild animals, if you use the same standard, it's just harder to meet for a lot of wild caught animals. And so we should probably not do it unless you already know you're fairly good at it.

So like you've already kept captive animals. You have looked at what it's going to look like, take care of this animal. willing to put in the effort for it. And then probably it should just be people that are doing it for the purpose of establishing a species or getting new bloodlines in or like specific locality type projects. Because I think inherently, even if you're abducting them, kidnapping them, whatever, like, emotive language we want to use, you're taking it from the wild,

but you then provide the right trade-off of security. versus their confinement, you could still theoretically do it. It's just going to be way harder. But, you know, like doing that for a tree frog, like, might be easier than doing that for a coach whip or something, you know. Right. Yeah, I think, again, it goes back to what species you're dealing with. And, you know, I guess for, you know, we think about the wild, we think, okay, they have a much broader range of, insect prey or prey availability.

They also have many times where there is no prey, you know, where they starve to death. Yeah. And they have very difficult time finding food or water, you know, that kind of thing. And I mean, you see things out. And they kill each other out of competition, not because they want to eat each other. Yeah, yeah. They want to breed the female and this guy's in the way. So I'm going to get rid of him or, you know, tear him up a bit.

But, you know, you also see, like, snakes peeling stuff off the road that's been hit. And, you know, it's basically beef jerky, you know, rotting in the sun. And they're going to eat that. Or they're drinking from a horrible pool of water, you know, stagnant, gross, you know, disgusting water full of disease, you know, bacteria or something that would probably kill us if we drink out of it. But, you know, they do that to survive. Whereas in captivity, you know, you're a horrible keeper if you're not giving your animal fresh water, you know, every day or every, you know, at least once a week or something, you know, that kind of thing. So, you know, there's a lot of things that they don't necessarily have to have. But whether or not that's a good thing or, you know, whether or not that stress or that time, I think, too, we can kill them with kindness and captivity.

Yeah. I mean, you see some of those bearded dragons that look like a ball, you know, because. they're so overfed, you know. So I don't think that's great either. So I do agree that we need to really base our, at least our essential or ideas of how they should be kept in captivity on their natural history and kind of try to find the things that are critical for their long-term well-being while avoiding things that may, you know, not be that critical. I've heard a number, I always love Terry Phillips example where he says, you know, you don't shovel snow into your rattlesnake enclosure because they experience snow in the wild, you know, that kind of thing.

But maybe getting, maybe getting them down to. Yeah, the temperature is important. Right, not the snow. Isn't it? Yeah, because they, they go into Dan's and burrows to avoid the snow. But, you know, I make a distinction in the paper between natural behaviors and positive natural behaviors. Right.

And sometimes stress is still positive. You can overcome it. Yeah. It can stimulate certain things that are good for their well-being. I've heard a number of people express a similar sentiment to what some of the things you said. But I think Phil Leitz with Proctor of Petaculture says it really succinctly multiple times when people are like, the animal didn't ask to be in the cage. Yeah. And he said, well, it didn't ask to be in the wild either.

Yeah, right. You know, like, because, yeah, you don't need to spend much time looking at how brutal it can be out in the wild. And the types of, you know, I think it would be clearly to the level of abuse for, outside of, like, true mistakes, right? For an animal to die of exposure, to die of heat, to die of drought, to die of. to starve to death in captivity, right? Those are things that should not happen. Right, right. And I mean, I think, too, like, I remember seeing a bearded dragon in the wild.

It was in Central Australia. We were driving through the West McDonald Ranges, and there was this bearded dragon basking on this rag. Adult-sized bearded dragon, and it had almost like a hairpin turn in its spine, this spinal kink that stuck up. a few inches above the back of the bearded dragon, but it was an adult. It was thriving,

you know, it was living in the best life in the wilds of central Australia. So I'm like, if that was a captive animal, they probably would have euthanized it, you know, that kind of thing. It looked,

it looked strange or it looked odd, you know, but that was kind of an interesting thing. Like, not every animal that's, you know, missing a limb or, you know,

have some growth or something is, is going to get picked off that easily. Yeah. Obviously, this thing survived for at least a year or two to get to that size. So kind of a cool thing. Yeah. So sometimes we have, um, uh, miss, I guess a misunderstanding of, of those kind of things,

you know, oh, we should put it down because it's suffering or it's not, well, I don't know. Maybe there is something to that, but, but this thing in the wild didn't seem to be suffering. You know, he's out basking and looking for a food. item something. So this raises an interesting point. Really, it was a quotation that I really liked from the front end of your paper where you say that the epistemological problem of knowing the mind of any being other

than yourself from Nagel. That really resonated with me just generally, right? And then fitting it into the lens of this conversation, both explicitly, what Justin was just talking about. And then you mentioned the idea of transparent boundaries. And you talked about that in the paper, too. And I have to admit that I'd never considered it through the lens that developing an abnormal stereotype behavior like interacting with transparent surfaces could somehow be detrimental to the captive animal. You know, that the fact it has developed that.

I mean, people. Yeah. Could be negative or problematic. That's just not the way that my, you know, paradigm of the world works. Yeah. That was a new kind of an expansive idea. So, yeah. It's like a fairly within the animal welfare circle, which I won't claim to be an expert in,

but it's a thing I'm spending a lot of time reading because I'm being encouraged by my boss to make this grow as a bit of an academic side hustle. people describe like glass surfing or you know unable to detect a transparent surface and interact with it appropriately when they start to stereotype it

and like go back and forth the same way they'll talk about putting the same stereotype category as like a big cat pacing in a too small of an enclosure and that similarly like big snakes like pushing when it becomes like it becomes almost

and I have no personal experience with it but from hearing people it does sound like it becomes like if they have the wrong they're too small of enclosure they're too hot they start pushing and then even when you fix that problem some of them just keep pushing and yeah

and so it does seem like something psychologically changes for some of these animals because of some degree of chronic toxic stress potentially and potentially lack of stimulation, some combination of those things potentially. I think in case people aren't familiar with epistemology or Thomas Nagel,

Thomas Nagel is a philosopher who I think does such a good job of talking about important topics in the common sense way. And so his, it's actually kind of like a small book. I'm going to maybe not say exactly right, but like what is it like to be a bat? Is an incredibly good read. A similar one would be, I think it's called crotalism. I forget, but like what's it like to be a rattlesnake,

essentially? Like, what's it like to see heat? it's very much after Thomas Nagel, because Nagel's like in the 70s is when this article is from. And so he talks about how unbelievably alien it would be to have echolocation and how we can't even truly begin to imagine it because we know how fast it has to work, how it simultaneously sees some things far away really well,

something's near really well, and then a lot of things in between not well at all. Like it's just like completely strong. strange to us. And yet they interact as if they can see at night. You know, that's like how we think about it. But then when you think about it, we actually don't even know what each other are really feeling and thinking.

And so that's what epistemology is. How do you know what you know? And, you know, there's lots of, you know, a criticism of philosophy in general is that it's a way to use fancy words to describe things that. people just know by intuition. And so, you know, a lot of it's assumed that, like, oh, we just have to, like, pick starting points of this is what we're assuming people know and we move from there, you know. And so this is, like, assuming a lot of empiricism of, like, the way I see the world is the way

the world functionally is, even if it's not, like, actually in that way. But I think it's true that we don't know what the lived experience of reptiles and amphibians are. but the way they interact with their world, unless the way we are seeing the world is completely deceived, like I'm part of the matrix or being deceived by an all-powerful demon, which are like classic epistemological problems, unless it's something like that, if the world is any what reliable for me to interact with, I have to take that these animals behave in a way, that there's something, there's some inner experience that they have.

And they have an inner experience that interacts with an outer experience. And so even though I don't know exactly what it's like, I should spend time thinking about it. That doesn't mean that I'm inappropriately giving them human characteristics and spending time to think about what their animal characteristics are. There's a fascinating book that I'll plug called, ooh, I'll look it up. I'm pretty sure it's the immense world. Yeah, immense world. an immense world by Ed Young, how animals' senses reveal the hidden realms around us.

It is an unbelievably good book. The best book I read this last year. And it goes through like sight, touch, smell, but then goes into like electrosense, magnetic sense, and all, like, in echolocation, all those things. And really shows how, you know, We see everything through vision. Yeah.

Like, our senses are so dominated by vision that we neglect so much of the world and probably to the detriment of the natural world quite a bit. Yeah. It's really interesting. That's cool. And I mean, as humans, we're really good at making up things, you know? Oh, yeah.

I know, I know my kids know exactly what their siblings thinking or why they did something, you know. We invent these stories about, you know, what's happening. And I think we do that with our reptiles in a lot of ways, too. And, you know, some extreme examples, you know, like, I guess there's always the joke that, you know, you're not going to go to Outback Australia and see a hammock and, you know, fake grass or something in the... No astroturf, yeah. Right. So, you know, I think we have this vision of what an animal needs.

And, oh, we think, oh, putting them on that fake grass is going to make him feel. more at home, you know, more what they want to feel or whatever. So, you know, and I think that's just naivety, not understanding their natural history to some extent, but I think that's just human nature to another extent. You know, we're just, we're good at that. We're good at making up things to explain why we're doing something or why we're the hero, you know, and somebody else is the villain or those kind of things. If I'm going to get back on my side of the fight, I would say that,

there's the possibility that even though some of us could meet this standard and can make it so that in captivity they could benefit, how many people do we think that is compared to the amount of reptiles, right? Like if you're talking about the average ball python, bearded dragon, crested gecko, corn snake, green iguana, you know, or a sulted tortoise owner, how many of them are meeting the standard. And I don't know, but I think I'd be discouraged if I really looked into it closely.

The straightforward approaches that that doesn't discount the fact that I can do it. But I do feel like there's some obligation there that I should try to improve that. Um, you know, that's maybe a little bit of my effort here is like, I'm going to make some academic stuff out there and then maybe other people will pay attention and maybe it'll start to change things. I don't know. But like, uh, yeah, some people can do it. But if, you know, if 25% of people aren't doing it, but I think it might be like the opposite, like 75% of people aren't doing it and aren't meeting a reasonable standard, how do we square that? Well, and I think an idea that's presented in the paper is maybe the way to square it is taking this as a reflective practice rather than being a binary meeting or not meeting, but rather as a pursuit, right? And so that even amongst that population, if you can encourage the idea as an end to pursue as a reflective practice, there's, you know, utility and value and not. So that it's not a function of is everyone doing that or are they, you know, meeting? that threshold. If they're even aware of it and kind of considering what they're doing through that lens, I think there's actually utility to that. And that's probably, you know, a benefit of putting this material out there.

Is he just encouraging the idea? And I do think in talking with people that, like, this happens too at work. Like, like, oh, we have a Labyrinth echo, you know, and then we start talking about it. And then I'm never trying to, like, preach to people about, like, how old's a UV bulb or, you know, like, you know, like. Yeah. You know, like, um, but often if they're engaged and asking questions about it, um, if there's something that comes up where it's clear that this would benefit their animal, they're usually pretty happy to do it. Mm-hmm. Um, and so that does give me hope.

I just feel like, to me, sometimes it feels like there's these herpeticulturist, whether you're like actively breeding animals, but you're like, you're engaged in the community and trying to advance some aspect of how animals are reproduced in captivity. And then there's a pet keeping side that is, I think, significantly bigger. Yeah. And a thing I think about is how do we combine this. So the animals benefit. Yeah.

And I don't know that any one thing is going to be. a constant either. I mean, I think we all go through a roller coaster of, you know, when we're keeping animals where, you know, maybe you're tired or you're overwhelmed from work and you just don't want to mess with it. So you just kind of let it go. And, well, they're reptiles. They can handle, you know, non-care for a little while or, or you misread it or miss, you know, construe things. So, you know, I think it changes from, even from week to week in some regards, you know, where your activity or your interest level and then you get reinvigoration. So I got to get out to my reptile room more often.

I got to hold this animal. I got to see this thing more often. Yeah. I do think this is kind of a little bit of a backtrack of the idea that we don't perceive the world in the same way they perceive it. I think potentially makes us miscalculate this of being so site-based, but we don't even have the same vision. like the fact that they see UVA and almost one provides a reasonable amount of UVA to the animal unless they're outside.

Do we even have access to the, you know, we don't have access to the sun in a bulb, you know? Yeah. I mean, some of those new, like the fauna lux. I don't, I haven't personally used it, but I've heard good things from people that do use it. And I would love to try it in the near future. but yeah, I mean, it's not the sun. And it's one thing to, like, not replicate the sun, but it's like another thing to think about, like,

taking out one of our colors. Right. You know, like if you, it's, it's not the same as going through the world with, like, green to do glasses or something, but it's analogous to it. Like, they're seeing the world without a dimension of color, and they're probably not seeing the world without, like, a fourth of, their color, but like an exponential decrease in their color.

But if they're captive bred and they're never in that environment. Yeah, but if we're comparing to the wild, you know what I mean? Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So is there a lived experience that of actual deficit? Yeah, I could see that being a very valid argument. If you're pulling something out of the wild and putting in an environment, it's not used to, it's not comfortable with, it's stressing it out, you know, but if you're born into this

world and you've never seen green do you miss green you know but and then another thing i think about is light and uh light pollution and sound pollution is the thing i've thought about a fair amount like what does it mean right now that i have the lights on in my room right or how many people blast you know heavy metal while they're cleaning their collection absolutely their geckos are like yeah or just like you know like i have my like wifi modem and i have an air purifier and stuff that are like making little buzzing noises. Right. If you're an animal that like doesn't hear in a way that we usually hear, but you're sensing things,

vibration on the ground potentially way more than we do. Right. Maybe that's really obnoxious. Yeah. I would, I would bring up cicadas, though. Sure. Trying to hurt with cicadas in the background is mind numbing. They've got to be, they've got to be like feeling that vibration.

if they're in that. Yeah. No, I agree. Yes, there's plenty of that in the wild, but there's not, there's not constant. Right, right. Now, cicadas are pretty, no. Yeah, when they're going. Yes. No, I hear you.

I was in, um, my last months of medical training, uh, a fellowship was in, in Cincinnati when brewed 10 came up, um, of cicadas, like, so periodical cicadas, not like the, the annual cicadas. Yeah. It was unbelievable. It's actually a thing that kind of inspired me to start an Instagram for my, um, my animals as another tangent here because I was documenting it.

Like this is wild. Like this is like unlike any of ever experienced. So I was making all these like Instagram stories, um, and posting them to like my personal Instagram. And then I eventually save them and then put them, it started my reptile Instagram. I was like, I think I like telling people little stories about nature.

And I know I don't want any more pressure than that. But I got kind of fulfilling because it was it was like some of the craziest times of being out in my neighborhood. Where it was like two months. Right. And experiencing those things, you know, it's one thing to have that, you know, in the flesh. That's next level. But even like watching, you know, planet Earth, I just remember sitting just transfixed, watching those Galapagos racers chase down hatchling iguanas and like trying to grab them and eat them, you know, oh, it's incredible footage. And I don't know, nature is far and away the most fascinating thing that we can enjoy, you know, I think in some ways.

I think about animal sense of smell and how, like what. Right. What does it mean for animals that can probably smell each other in a room full of other snakes or other animals, but they don't actually ever interact? I don't know. You know, like, they seem comfortable, but like, is it because they're used to it? Would it be much better if we didn't? Like, if we could invent smell-proof barriers, would it be better, you know? Right. And their own smell, too. I mean, I remember watching.

What does it mean that we do full substrate changes? Right, right. Or like a complete disinfection of a tank every time they use the restroom. It's like, oh, man, that's a little overkill. But, you know, yeah. Or gut microbiome. You know, how much does that play rolling? Because it plays a huge role in humans. I mean, you can have personality changes because of gut chink, you know, gut microflora changes. There's all sorts of crazy science behind that. Yeah. And I don't know. I have some feelings behind this, but the little geckers I have, there's like some folk husbandry around the idea that the babies do so much better when they're with the parents because of poop.

Right. And I'm sure that is true of it. They get inoculated. But I think some of it might be because they're not a cannibalistic gecko. do quite well in colonies. And they, if you're going to put a baby that can fit on your, uh,

thumbnail in, uh, even like a one gallon enclosure, you can't really find it. And so then to make like an appropriate size gradient in like a 16 ounce container is almost impossible. And so then you like cook them or you, you know,

you know, you do all the wrong things. And so I feel like that might be, but, but all that to say, you'll find people that keep these geckos that say they need to eat they need to be with their parents poop in order to live. I mean, you do see that with tortoises. You do.

Yeah. Often eat their poop or their own poop or whatever. You know, yeah. I mean, rabbits need to do that in order to get the nutrients out of their meal. You know, they have to eat it a couple times to get the stuff out of grass. You know, I don't think so. But at the same. same time, if they're captive bread, do they even have the microflora that they, you know,

that they would have in the wild? Absolutely not. But like, just that they need to have that, that basic level. I, you know, that's hard to say. I think there's some utility in thinking about the idea of like, you know, pre-industrial humans and comparing us to them, right? Like, the fact that we are much more sedentary, that we have thoroughly disrupted our circadian rhythm, that we live in dense populations and so the levels of contagion and stress-term immune system is so much higher. I think those are probably objectively bad, but by like quote-unquote domesticating humanity, we've had a huge health benefit in long-jave benefit and lots of benefits outside of it, but you find lots of people being like like how do I eat in a more primitive way how do I like move my body in a way that maintains things the way my ancestors would have how do I you know maintain yeah maintain my joints and how do I interact other people and how do I like make a tribe without being uh you know um and still be inclusive of other people like you you hear those people that are like how do I engage in the things that are like how do I engage in the things.

things that we've involved to do because we can't, we didn't erase that in 500 years. Right. And is it inherently better, you know? I mean, yeah, we, we might have traded heart disease for taking medication, you know, taking medication for, you know, not having those issues. Yeah. Put the statins in the water, I say. Right.

Right. But does that mean our, you know, caveman ancestors? Yeah. we're better off, you know. But, you know, maybe if we didn't. Miladon or whatever, you know, design our cities around parking lots and we actually walk places and biked places and we made cities like that. Right.

We actually would be a lot better and we'd have the best of both worlds. So, like, I think there are, uh, humans are supposed to move. Yeah. Humans are supposed to move. Yeah. And so arguably I'd say like a frog, a poison frog is supposed to hunt through leaf litter and ball python is supposed to sit in ambush for days at a time and uh i mean hog no snake is supposed to eat a toad but how many captive brand hognows snakes eat toads you know so i think there is some some plasticity in that

some but also i would say like a hogno snake is supposed to burrow through loose substrate and attack from that way and spend a lot of time thermal regulating in the dirt right right um and i do think they can have issues shoes if they're not set up properly. They get those like, what growths are swelling around their cloaca, where their spurs would be if they were pythons. That area, you know, you can see issues that way if they're not kept on a proper thermal regimen or substrate, you know, those kind of things do happen. Yeah, it's, it's hard to say. I mean, we call them poisoned art frogs, but they're not even poisoning. They're not even poisoning. Are we feeding them what they need if they don't get their

poison. Yeah. No, I think that's valid. And like what we have to grow some beetle with, isn't it like a certain beetle that has, you know, I think it's lots of things. Like mites and all kinds of stuff. Right. Or like the idea of, um, you know, like I steal the eggs from them, you know, like I don't have any that would rate completely raise them by themselves, but all of them will transport them. You know, transport the tadpoles. And I don't let them do that. Right. Um, they clearly come back and. check on the site. Are they mad?

Are they sad? Those are very clearly human emotions. But to take that out, like that, I'm being evocative there, is it distressedful to them that they laid 10 eggs and fertilize them? Especially for a species that would keep track and find them in the canopy, you know, go to the Bramilead that they're specific. And for those species, most of them. people don't take them away because it's just so much harder to raise them. But like,

right, right. A lot of snakes do maternal incubation and vary who people do that. It doesn't seem like it distresses them, but like it's like I think those are things worth thinking about. Well, there are some species in the wild that actually leave their clutches if the conditions are right. They'll leave them early to get a head start on the next breeding season, you know. So it's, it is hard to assign value one way or another. You know, I think that's why you need to know that natural history. Right. That type of, like knowing that some will abandon them for their own benefit when the

conditions are good. Yeah. Says a lot. Right. Right. Yeah. That's, I mean, that ties back into research. And, you know, we, we don't know a lot about a lot of stuff, you know.

Like, even some of the more common things that we interact with are almost like have a familiarity bias where we're not going to study in because we already see them all the time. what do we need to know about those things? That kind of thing. We want to chase the rare or endangered things. And then they're so hard to find that we have a hard time making any conclusions from that research because we just don't have a good end.

There's not enough to have in a study. So, yeah, there's a lot of challenges in that kind of thing. And, you know, we can potentially make those observations in captivity and find, you know, interesting things that occur, you know, most likely occur in the while that we didn't know until we watched him in a box. I had some baby Hosmer's spiny-tailed skinks, a gurney-a-hossmeri, and I put in some crickets, and all of a sudden I see this baby like raising his arm up and kind of moving his hand around and then pouncing on the cricket, almost like, you know, when the geckos get excited and they wave their hair. Oh, yeah, yeah, that kind of thing where he's like, oh, and then grabs it.

I don't know if he's distracting. Hey, look up here. appear like we catch a lizard, you know, you kind of give them something to look at, and then you grab them with the other hand, kind of thing. So it was really kind of cool. And I'm like, hey, has anybody else seen this? And a few people had witnessed the same thing with theirs. I thought it was really cool behavior.

Yeah. But, you know, yeah. Are you going to see that in the wild? That would be a, yeah, hard thing's to be probably. Yeah, for sure. But I mean, you know, I was watching some Pilbara rock monitors and and they would, you know, run around on the rocks.

And then they'd settle and they would do this weird tail wiggle flop thing. Or they'd kind of, it was almost like they were, okay, look, look here. This is the last thing you're going to see moving, which is the non. That was my interpretation. Yeah. Like they were settling and moving something to be a decoy. So any predator that's watching him, that's the last thing they see moves. So that might be where they attack kind of thing.

I don't know. But it was kind of cool. And that's fairly consistent with different long, tail monitor species, they'll do that little tail wiggle. Do they do it in captivity or do they need to move a certain amount to do that? I don't know. I've never really kept them to see that. So, yeah, it's a good question.

Or if they have. Yeah, it's not something that I've seen. Okay. Yeah. And is it, you know, a factor of they're not worried about predation involved? Is it actually a beneficial behavior or not? Right, right. Because they're not showing that.

Yeah. Knows. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So, yeah, there's so many cool things to think about. And this is a great, great paper and great thought process. I don't know if we said where to find it. Yeah, yeah, or the title even. Did you just mention the title? Yeah, sure. Let's get that out there. The title is. Captive equivalence as the minimal welfare standard for captivity managed her pitifana by William and Sveen. It is in the captive and field herpetology journal. And so if you go to captive and fieldherpetology.com, it's open source. And so anyone can find it there.

Probably comes up on a Google Scholar search as well. It comes up on a Google Scholar search. And so if you go to the site, it's published as like a free, a standalone article, not as like one of the full volumes. It's click on journal. You'll scroll all the way to the bottom, click on,

I'll do it right now. You have to click on individual articles. And right now it's the third one down. But as they publish more, it will, you know, be the fourth one. So it's labeled as an opinion piece.

How was the, was there a review process or was it? So it's peer reviewed. It's, um, yeah it's a small journal um and so uh i did submit it to a few other places because this is my first time doing um an animal any type of animal ethics so i didn't know the landscape very well so i you know it's uh as i'm sure you know you often start at the top and then you keep on

marching down and tell you depending on how exhausted you get by the rejections um but i was really just trying to like figure out the landscape and so like i submitted to the first place that's like a big name if you just Google animal ethics journals you know like you're going to find these big names and they're like we're not interested in a utilitarian argument like this like if it's not animal rights based and not to say that they're like animal rights elitist but like they just weren't

interested in a utilitarian argument and right so they're like you should go to this like more applied area. And then I went there and you're like, this isn't like welfare enough. You should go back to the first place. That's what's theoretical. I actually already applied

there or there. And so this process took about six months. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it can be a pain, especially in herpetology journals for some. And I had it already written for like a solid three months before that.

Yeah. I had presented at IHS. I wanted it published. And so I messaged around the, I'm like, I think Ben, shoot, I should know his name. He's been on Dylan's podcast, is the editor of this. And he seemed like a receptive audience. And they had an article published a couple years before that was like the ethics of field herping essentially. I was like I want to write and they label it as an opinion piece. I want it labeled like that like an editorial, but I want it peer reviewed. Can you do that?

It's like, absolutely sent it. It still took a while because peer review takes a while and it's especially from a small place and he's a busy guy. Right. It got peer reviewed. I got feedback. I made a few changes, but it was a pretty seamless process from there. Very cool. Yeah. Well, yeah, go, go out and read it, get it, and see what you think. You know, give Billy some feedback. Yeah, I love any feedback, especially criticism. That means another paper. Right.

Yeah. Rob, did you have something you wanted to say? Well, I was just going to say, we'll put a link to it in the show notes as well. Eric gave me some feedback that we could help make his life easier by giving him sort of more exhaustive show notes that we'd go with things so he wouldn't try and figure it out himself. So I'll include this as a link there. So should be in the bottom for the show when folks are listening anyway and said it was great that you explained how they could go find it to the extent that doesn't work, but that'll be

the idea. Cool. Yeah. Awesome. Very nice. Yeah, it's always always nice. I mean, you provided us a link and it was easier just to click on it rather than having to go find it. And, you know, I guess not in this case, but some papers have paywalls. You know, this is open. made too many. Yeah. So it's hard sometimes to find it. That was the case with Gavin's article. That's why I was glad he provided that.

If your tax money is providing for most of the science, whether or indirectly, you should be able to read it. Right. And I think a lot of people may not know that when you are submitting an article to an open source journal, it's often much more expensive to. Yeah. You're paying $2,000 or something. Yeah.

Yeah. A couple grand to publish an article in a journal that, is, you know, so that's, that's a tricky thing too, you know, like should we have to pay to make it available to everybody kind of thing or I guess the alternative is they pay to view it, you know, and that's maybe not the best either. So, yeah, it's kind of a crazy thing. I guess you can't have a journal for free. Right. Somebody's got to pay somewhere. It's only the very best journals that can be that diamond status where it's

free review and free to publish. Those are very difficult to publish in. Oh yeah. Yeah. Like New England Journal Medicine and stuff. Right. Yeah. Science or nature

or those top tier journals. Yeah. Yeah. Well, awesome discussion. Any other final thoughts or did we cover it all right? I'm sure there will be other things we bring up at a later date and have you back on. It's always fun to have you on.

You're a great person to discuss things with, you know, very thoughtful and thorough. Yeah. It was fun even on your recap episode hearing. I think it was the first one that we had done had come up on the last one. I was like, oh, this is fun to hear, to hear Rob interject some, you know, different perspectives in there. I was like, oh, I'd like this. This is good.

Yeah. I love the format of the show. It's a fun one. Yeah. It's, yeah, it's, it's, there's a never-ending source or supply of topics. So that, that reminds me if anybody listening has an idea or, you know, wants to expound on different ideas we've explored before, hit us up, you know, let us know what you want to do. We can either debate it without you or you can come on and debate it with us. So that's always the, the question. Do you want to come on or do you want to come on or do you? want to just have us fight it. So yeah, but we, we appreciate listeners and their ideas as well. So it makes our job a lot easier. And also, if you have ideas for people that we can get on, and I mean, Rob's done a fantastic job of rounding up folks to come on the podcast. And I've kind of gotten a little lazy and late as of late, but I try to try to book a few shows here and there. And, and, but yeah, That's very, very helpful.

If there's somebody you want to hear, come on and fight. That'd be great. I don't know. Any cool things in the realm of herpeticulture or herpetology that you've heard lately that you want to share? I listened to Nick. He did the expert in the idiot. I'm about halfway through it. Maybe two-thirds, something like that.

He did make the statement that when have humans ever come together to make the world a better place. And I would argue that chloro-fluorocarbons and, you know, the ban on those, which patched the large holes in the ozone layer and made the world a better place, that's a great example of that. So it does happen, Nick. There's never a never in science, I think. As ever, right? Yep. Yep. So, but yeah, really, really good listening to Nick talk about prehistoric animals and some of the cool megafauna that used to live. Yeah, there's a lot of fun stuff there. Yeah, good stuff.

Any other cool things? I mentioned Gavin's paper. That's fun. But yeah, always cool to see new species described. Absolutely. I've been enjoying the Frog Rack podcast, which I know is not snakey. It's much more amphibian-based by the name. but a newer podcast by

Joe who has like a really interesting approach where he he's essentially like off-grid homesteading in the northeast so provides all of his own water all of his own electricity and so he has like a very different like so he has like animals all of his nudes are like in his basement and like cycle naturally down there And like it's really interesting how his approach to it. That's cool. He's had me on there, but he's had a lot of other more impressive people than me that can talk about their collections and lots of really interesting insight into how he goes about things.

Did he go on amphibicast some time ago? Maybe a year. Maybe he definitely went on not another reptile podcast. Okay. Okay, because it sounds familiar. Yeah. It talks about how he can't have, like, more tree frogs because he can't have heat on them. You know, he can only have so many tropical enclosures. Yeah.

Okay. Interesting. Well, cool. Oh, check it out. One really cool thing that I watched this week. And I would recommend watching it on YouTube because it's really fast. At least it was really exciting for me. It's Chris Applin's podcast. this one. Yeah, yeah, the Varanis fault podcast number, episode 29, goes over the Varanus Tristus and, you know, he's got a field herper on there that's seen a lot of these forms and been to a lot of the areas that

is involved in the paper, but they talk about a recent publication that kind of breaks down Varanus Tristus, where there were once two subspecies. Now there are two species, now there are two species, Varanus Tristus and Varanis Orientalis and kind of breaks down, you know, where those lines were drawn and the reasoning and kind of characteristics of the two species. So another new verana species, which was long time coming, I'm sure, you know, and there's probably more to be done there. Tremendous range on that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Same kind of thing where you can see in the, in the, it's similar to the Antaresia paper, like where, yeah, they, they boil it down to two species, but they probably could have. have been, you know, if it was somebody else doing the work, there probably could have been five or six different species. And so, yeah, it's kind of a, but it's really cool to see the actual, you know, animals from the different parts of their range and kind of how they

compare with other parts of the range or how they fit into the different species description. So I'd recommend that highly. Chris does a good job with that and his guest, trying to think of or find the name of who that was. But anyway, you'll see if you can. go watch it. Sorry to whoever the guest was. I'm terrible with names. Come on here and we can fight about it. Fight about it.

I did start it, so it should be here bearing in mind. But then I heard, oh, you should watch it on YouTube. So I haven't quite got to that point yet. But, Will, but his name's not in the thing. Will Scott. Oh, Will Scott.

Yeah, that's right. Because I kept thinking my, I have a friend over there who's also a Scott, you know, last name Scott. So I was like, I wonder if they're related. Yeah. We also, or I also listened to Stephen Tillis on, on that other network talking, MJ and reviewed. Oh, that was the one Lucas was talking about in coffee. Yeah, yeah. That was a fun show too.

Yeah. Yeah. And I interjected a little bit as a commentator. on that was pretty good. I would have two if I would have been, if I would have watched it live. I just saw it come out. I'm like, oh, I didn't know about it. But yeah, there were a few comments for like, oh, if you only knew a virologist.

Yeah. If only. Stephen Tillis? No, no. This is the carpets and coffee with Eric and Owen. Oh, did someone, did you say Stephen Tillis or you didn't say? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I see. Okay. Once removed. I was like Stateness is very articulate about viruses. I met him at IHS this last year.

Oh, yeah, yeah. He's a great guy. We rode on the bus from O'Dwana Land together, and I picked his brain for the whole time. It was fantastic. Yeah, we put it with a paper together. Yeah, yeah, I know, because you were on his, like, scholarly or like a dissertation committee. Right?

No, no. I was on Lucas Lees. That's what I'm getting at you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know you've worked with Stephen of course. Yeah, but we published a paper with Robert Osabov. And we did the antiviral side of things.

And they did the viral, you know, propagation and, you know, cell lines and things like that. So, yeah, fun stuff. Lots of good stuff out there. It's always hard to keep up, you know, keep up with everything that's going on. So, yeah. But that's the way it goes, I guess. Good thing that there's always more information coming out, always new. podcasts to listen to always

fun to do. All right, well, where can people find you? Get in touch or Instagram, creepers herpeticulture is the place. My stuff goes over to Facebook, but I don't really

check that very often, so Instagram is the place for that. Yeah. Cool. All right, well, chat with Billy about his paper. Awesome. Yeah. All right, well, As always, thanks to Eric and Owen in the Morali Python's group,

and we will catch you again next time for Reptile Fight Club. See you later.