I grew up in the Maryland suburbs and spent much of my childhood in the woods. I would turn over rocks to find shiny centipedes and watch small schools of fish glide through the creek as box turtles sunbathed on the banks. A squirrel’s frenzied search for a nut would capture my full attention.

I liked these critters so much that I wanted animals around all the time. So I asked my parents to take me to the pet store — a place where many small animals, for a small price, could be mine.

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Fish were my first passion, and I can still picture the aquarium store I frequented: rows of tanks holding tropical fish of unknown provenance, their lives just a couple dollars apiece. I bought a few with my allowance, and despite closely following the feeding and water quality instructions, the fish would inevitably die a few weeks or months later, and I would reliably return to the aquarium store to buy a few more.

Eventually, I moved on from fish and bought two hamsters, which was fun — until one ate the other. Hamsters are highly solitary, it turns out, and can turn cannibalistic when confined together; no pet store employee warned me.

When the other one died, I gave up on small pets, and resigned myself to observing animals in the woods. (I tried — and failed — to win the affection of our family cat, Clover, who only ever really liked my dad.)

My experience was hardly unique. Each year, American households buy tens of millions of small animals to keep as pets — mostly fish, but also gerbils, lizards, birds, snakes, frogs, turtles, and more. Many are bred in the US, but an estimated 90 million individuals are imported annually, one-third of whom are taken from the wild.

While many people have probably experienced something like I did, there’s still a general sense that small pets are good — compared to cats and dogs, they take up less space, they’re ostensibly easier for kids to care for, and even if they’re kept in confinement, surely their lives are better than they would be in the wild. Right?

But in recent years, I’ve come to believe that pet ownership is much more ethically fraught than I once did, and more than most would assume. I say this as a pet owner myself. Like so many people, my partner and I adopted a dog, Evvie, early in the Covid-19 pandemic. But as the pandemic subsided, she spent more time alone, even beyond the hours we worked on our laptops and tended to the rest of our lives.

That meant less time to do her favorite things — walk around the neighborhood, run in the woods, play tug of war, and meet new people — and more time bored on the couch.

It compelled me to look more closely at the ethics of pet keeping, and eventually, I outlined those concerns in a story provocatively titled “The case against pet ownership.” I argued that beneath the warm and fuzzy narrative of a life with pets — companionship, love, and mutual affection — lies a darker side.

There are the unambiguous cruelties, like ​​physical abuse, hoarding, puppy mills, and dog fighting. Then there are the cruelties that have long been socially acceptable but are falling out of favor, like declawing and ear cropping. But there’s also more casual neglect and harm that often goes unseen and unspoken: aversive training, prolonged crating, monotonous diets, lack of exercise and agency, and the ensuing boredom of captivity.

The article focused on dogs and cats, which make up the slight majority of the US pet population, but they’re just part of the story. Around 40 percent of America’s pets are small, largely wild or “exotic” animals — fish, birds, small mammals, amphibians, and reptiles — and they likely suffer far more than our canine and feline companions.

These animals might seem logically poised for captivity, given their typically smaller sizes and seemingly stoic dispositions. But as we learn more about their inner lives and consider the behaviors they evolved to have in the wild, the serious problems with this arrangement quickly emerge.

Think of the tropical bird caged in a city apartment, unable to fly; the Australian bearded dragon languishing in a suburban American basement under a heat lamp; the ball python native to Central and Western Africa with a diverse diet and impressive hunting finesse subsisting off one frozen-thawed rat every other week; or the countless species of fish whose miles-wide ranges in the wild are shrunk down to a couple of feet in a tank.

“I think that the welfare of these animals is worse than anybody else’s,” Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist and author of several books on the ethics of pet keeping, told me. Yet pet stores, who often market these animals as starter pets for children, “really capitalize on small animals…that’s where they make a lot of money.”

Fish swim around their tank at the Pet World store in Lakewood, Colorado.

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Anya Semenoff/The Denver Post via Getty Images

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Anya Semenoff/The Denver Post via Getty Images

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Zach Hyman/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

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Zach Hyman/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

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Other species have found strong markets in dedicated communities of adult hobbyists who share pictures and trade tips on Reddit, Facebook groups, and other forums. Given their exotic looks, the rise of shortform video content — via TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram Reels — has driven even more interest in breeding and owning them.

Even shrimp, cockroaches, giant snails, and rare isopods are kept as pets now.

I have no doubt that many of the millions of Americans who keep these animals as pets love them and go the extra mile to give them as good of a life as they can. Indeed, companionship, love, and company is a top motivator to get a small pet, according to a large survey on pet ownership. But the same survey also shows that the top motivator to acquire small pets is “fun to watch/have in household.”

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