When the pandemic first started many people turned to pets to keep them company in solitary confinement, but now that restrictions are easing a lot of these pets are ending up at rescue centres.
Mike London, the owner of Reptile Kingdom, a pet store and reptile safe house adoption centre on Highway 20 in Thorold, says he has seen a huge uptick in rescues since the third lockdown ended. Says London, “We’ve been receiving a lot of rescues over the summer. I think it’s because things have been starting up and restrictions have been lifted. On average we get about two or three surrenders a week.”
London says there can many different reasons for the surrendering of a reptile. “Every time it’s different. A lot of people bring in really healthy animals that are in great shape and they feel terrible about surrendering it. Sometimes people let them (loose) because they don’t want them anymore or sometimes people lose them. There’s a thousand different reasons why they end up at our place.”
London’s love for reptiles started in his early childhood. Says London, “When I was a kid I had these encyclopedias and my two favourite ones were the snake one and the dinosaur one. It kind of just started from there. My poor mother, she had a pretty bad fear of snakes and I wouldn’t shut up about snakes and how much I wanted one. I was allowed to have turtles and lizards but then when I was a teenager I finally got the okay to get a little snake. And then it kind of blew up from there. Once I got one in the house I had fifteen in less than a year.”
It wasn’t long until London started breeding his own reptiles. Says London, “I was breeding geckos, little snakes, and chameleons and I would sell them to wholesalers and stores. What I kind of learned quickly on is that a lot of these animals are not treated the way that I thought. A lot of them die on the road getting delivered to stores and there seems to be a serious lack of knowledge or education when it comes to taking care of these animals.”
London got out of the reptile breeding business and started putting on educational reptile shows to warn people of the dangers of animal breeding.
Then in 2011 in Welland, when almost 300 reptiles were found abandoned after their owner died, London got called in to assist with “Canada’s largest reptile removal”, which started off a close working relationship with the SPCA. “It was an international effort. They had people coming from all around the world try to help figure this problem out because some of these animals were extremely rare and extremely dangerous,” says London.
“The SPCA said, ‘you should start a safe house for us to send our reptiles to because we run into this problem quite often.’”
And thus the reptile safe house and adoption centre was born.
London says it’s been hard to keep up with the uptick in surrenders, especially during a global pandemic. “The SPCA doesn’t do their own investigations anymore. It got handed to the Provincial Animal Welfare Services, so we lost all our funding from the SPCA. It wasn’t a lot but it definitely helped. We’ve been pretty much using the money from our store to be able to do it.”
Even though it’s getting difficult, London says he has no plans to give up on his rescue efforts. “It’s something we believe in. We’re definitely still going to do it but we got to be careful that we don’t take in too much at once because it’s just very costly.”
