What do you guys think about the healthy trade initiative. Has anyone joined and went through or started the certification process and if so are you finding it useful?
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Edit: I don’t do things like this often, but I want to retract my comment from earlier. I am leaving it in strike through font for transparency and posterity.
I’ve had some more time to look into things now that I’m up and about.
There’s a lot of things going on with this .org and it’s not all good. It has a really good public facing, but looking more into paperwork and things it starts looking more suspicious.
I love the idea of a dedicated reptile rescue with vets and testing available… But there’s a lot of odd things going here that give me red flags in paperwork and such.
The Healthy Trade Institute?
I hadn’t heard of it until now. This is the rescue group working out of Tennesee?
Looking at it… it seems like a nice idea. It’s just a larger and better medically supported rescue than previously done in the past by the looks of it. A focus on outreach with businesses and some healthy animal management protocols.
I’ve never heard of anyone adopting through them or working with them, but I’m not the most active in circles online. They also don’t seem to work with reticulated or burmese pythons at all, don’t accept snakes over 4 feet and don’t accept torts and turtles…so it seems a bit limited on a lot of reptiles in need.
There seem to be a lot of positives to it, but I don’t know how many people will end up joining through them. it seems niche still. The list of memberships on the .org seems pretty limited as well. And only 8 members on Patreon.
This is all what I gather from a news article and 10 minute review of the website
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I have very serious reservations about the credibility of this organization given one of the testimonials they have is from a store that was permanently removed from MM for selling sick animals
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Like @armiyana & @t_h_wyman I also am leery of this organization. There are some screaming red flags if you look deeper than surface level. According to their FAQ:
HTI is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the responsible and sustainable trade of amphibians and reptiles by certifying businesses that adhere to best practices for animal health, welfare, and environmental safety.
How can you claim you want to promote responsible and sustainable trade when one of your sponsors is one of the biggest reptile wholesalers with a known poor reputation who is also the supplier to some of the major pet store chains? Part of the problem with the hobby is that the majority of species are massively overbred, and this in and of itself discredits any claim of responsible and sustainable trade.
Additionally, looking through their adoption requirements, you find that they prioritize “adopting” to basically everyone else before pet homes, “adopters” are allowed to resell the animals, and if they deem you worthy, there is no limit to the number of animals you can “adopt”. From their PDF, bolded the notable sections:
The prioritization of HTI Herp Adoption is as follow: (1) HTI Business Members, (2) Other Businesses or Zoos, and (3) Individuals (18 or older). Adopters must demonstrate they are capable of caring for the requested species. Adoption does not prevent a business or individual from selling the animal; however, HTI Healthy Trade Certification is non-transferrable unless the transaction is between HTI Business Members. There is no limit to the number of animals that can be adopted if the adopter demonstrates they have adequate husbandry capacity and experience.
They ask if you plan to breed or resell, so seems like there’s no prohibition on breeding these animals. There is no standard “adoption fee”, just a section asking if you’d be willing to pay one and how much you think is reasonable. This question alone is just gross to me:
How many animals of each species do you want to adopt? If your primary goal is to
resell, please indicate how many animals you could receive each month.
As for their health testing, it’s lackluster, in my opinion. Pricing isn’t too bad, looks like $45-$60 for pooled samples (up to 3), and $20-$35 for individual swabs. However, the way they plan to do testing leaves a lot of room for things to slip through the cracks:
Member businesses are required to test a subset of newly acquired animals before release from the quarantine area and test a subset of resident and for-sale animals twice per year to validate health.
Only a subset of all animals will ever be tested, meaning you could still have deadly pathogens in a collection and it not be detected. For me, I feel like the bare minimum for certification for something like this should be all breeding animals and any new intakes if you’re going to make big claims. We’ve also got to keep in mind that depending on the disease being tested for and the type of testing, inaccurate results can happen. Take for example Cryptosporidium serpentis. Testing accuracy is highly dependent on method of sampling and whether or not the animal is actively shedding enough of the organism to be detected.
They’re currently only testing for a very small number of pathogens per species. In snakes it’s only Crypto and Snake Fungal Disease. They do say they will add testing, but that’s not really reassuring when there are so many other diseases and parasites that can heavily impact a collection. This also brings up the fact that the more testing that is required, the higher the price. While customers may be willing to pay more for a health tested animal, there is a point at which cost becomes prohibitive.
Lastly, I’ve found no mention about safeguards against bad practices. Nothing about what they do about animals with defects, potential hybrids, lineage information, breeding restrictions on “adopted” animals, what happens if someone isn’t on the up and up, etc. They insist animals will be placed in, “knowledgeable, caring environments that prioritize their health and welfare” but allow resale (seemingly without restriction, meaning there is no vetting of the buyer it ends up with after “adoption” and then sale by the adoptee) and breeding.
To me, this reads as nothing more than a program to build a façade around the industry, making it look far more altruistic than the reality. It looks like a good way to take unwanted pet animals and shunt them back into the breeding/sales/profitability pipeline instead of finding them another appropriate pet home.
Overall, they’ve been very careful about the outward marketing of this program, but the further you dig the more it looks like they’re just polishing a massive turd, and it’s heavily concerning that it’s being rubber stamped by some of the more well known names in the hobby.
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I’d also like to add, their membership pricing disproportionately penalizes, if not entirely prices out the smallest breeders. A membership for a hobby level breeder doing $5,000 or less in sales (that’s sales, not profit) per year is $100/year. That’s 2% of your total sales going to membership fees. If you sell even less than that, say $1,000, that’s 10%. This price also does not include their required testing and associated costs (supplies, shipping) which must be done at minimum twice yearly. For many smaller breeders it likely wouldn’t be worth it.
If you look at the other tiers, the breakdown is as follows:
| Total Sales Volume | Membership Cost | Percentage of Total Sales |
|---|---|---|
| $5,001 - $20,000 | $200/Year | approx. 1%-4% of total sales |
| $20,001 - $100,000 | $600/Year | approx. 0.6%-3% of total sales |
| $100,001 - $500,000 | $3,000/Year | approx. 0.6%-3% of total sales |
| $500,001+ | $5,000/Year | approx. 1% or less of total sales |
They do have a cost estimation calculator linked on their site, so I decided to plug in some numbers. The requested fields are estimated annual sales, total number of habitats (defined as, “an independent living unit [e.g., tank, plastic container, box] that is not connected to another living unit containing animals.”), number of new animal shipments per year, and average number of animals per shipment.
Say you’re a smaller scale breeder, making that less than $5,000 in total sales per year. You’ve got 50 habitats, and you receive 3 new animal shipments at an average of one animal per box. Here’s their estimated cost breakdown:
| Calculated Costs: |
|---|
| Annual Membership Fee: $100.00 |
| Estimated Annual Shipping Sampling Costs: $150.00 |
| Estimated Annual Consumable Costs: $79.00 |
| Estimated Testing Costs for Year 1: $500.00 |
| Estimated Total Cost for Year 1: $679.00 |
| Estimated Testing Costs Beyond Year 1: $350.00 |
| Estimated Total Cost Beyond Year 1: $529.00 |
If you only sold $1,500 in total for the year, you’d be giving HTI 45.2% of that without factoring in any other expenses. Even if you made $4,999, that’s still 13.5%.
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This is literally what I paid last month alone for my dogs recheck/labs… And I am in that bracket. Lol. The rest of my earnings would be my maintenance cost at home for the feeders and my pets.
It’s a silly model if they expect small breeders to get in on it and get ‘certified’.
Also … They’re partnered under the Pet Advocacy Network, formerly known as Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council (PIJAC).
So that’s another warning flag for me.
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Thanks for the feedback everyone. I have reached out to them for further details and if I learn anything of note I will update the thread.
My thoughts on the information we have so far:
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Seller with bad reputation being a member. PR wise that’s not good lol On the positive side maybe they can help them clean up their situation or at least begin to mitigate the issues. Whether someone genuinely wants help or they want to paper over a PR problem is a legitimate concern. I hope it’s the later because the amount of disease in the reptile hobby is staggering and I would say at crisis levels. I’m not sure how much longer we can hide from these issues. More and more people are testing their animals and it’s going to get harder and harder for people to ignore these issues. I saw a recent news headlines where authorities in WA state confiscated some salamanders which then tested positive for disease and in response they notified local authorities to investigate. That’s bad PR for the hobby as a whole, too.
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That brings me to the issue of cost. Testing on a large scale is expensive but there’s really no way around that. Pcr tests are down to 20$ a test commercially and that seems to also be what they are suggesting the fees would be, pool of 3 for 60$. The amount of testing they are requiring to me sounds like the bare minimum and is much less than what I do myself and that seems to be where the bulk of the cost is coming from. So the testing is not as thorough as one would like, but surely better than the current standard of no testing, and 20$ per test seems reasonable to me. The problem that some diseases are very difficult to detect will remain, but we’re currently in a pit of darkness and even a candle provides some illumination.
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Hi Kevin,
I talked to these folks (Drs Galvin and Gray) face to face within the last year. We talked about the limited test offerings and pricing; they agreed about both. They said that the membership pricing was possibly up for individual discussion for smaller breeders. I think about the organization in light of how they came to be (concerned about imports, particularly amphibians) and what part of the hobby they’re most centrally targeting (the larger players), how they’re trying to address the issue (selective testing to improve overall collection health, rather than pretending that there’s a testing protocol that’s going to detect literally all cases) and that gives me an overall positive impression. Coming at this from breeding common hobby reptiles might make the project a little harder to understand, but considering bigger threats such as Bsal makes some of the harsher comments look as off base as they are. Amphibian pathogens are a lot more big-picture important than common snake viruses or others that are pretty much restricted to captive collections, but the herp hobby is pretty myopic on some of these issues.
I wasn’t aware of the adoption arm when I talked to them. That they get a vet to screen every animal (which presumably would catch “defects” and other issues that wouldn’t be appropriate to publish a hard policy about), require photo/video proof of housing (which as a regular herp purchaser I’ve of course never been asked to provide), possibly a background check (ditto), and a possible interview seems to me to be objectively not too bad. I would be interested to hear about other rescues that do all this to see how they compare to the norm.
I don’t think that concerns about hybrids and lineage are particularly warranted in adoption situations, especially in light of the fact that they’re regularly ignored in actual sales of breeding stock (which is definitely a bad situation, of course).
I’m not so concerned about the promotion by actors that people like to hate – at least, not any more so with this organization than with any other similar one; there’s a “big reptile wholesaler” in another hobby favorite organization that would get a different interpretation, I’m sure. It is really hard to have an honest and fairly comprehensive view of the overall hobby and pretend that those people/companies/behaviors are a complete deal breaker. It is something of a baby/bathwater situation.
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Dear All:
Thank you for starting this conversation and for taking the time to discuss the Healthy Trade Institute (HTI)! We appreciate thoughtful questions and the opportunity to provide additional context about our work.
To clarify, the Healthy Trade Institute (HTI), operates two programs:
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Healthy Trade Certification Program for Businesses – helping reptile and amphibian businesses reduce the spread and impact of infectious diseases.
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Nationwide Herp Surrender and Adoption Program - helping pet owners responsibly re-home reptiles and amphibians that can no longer be cared for.
Our mission is straightforward: to reduce disease in the U.S. pet reptile and amphibian trade and reduce the release of pet reptiles and amphibians into the wild. As the organization grows, we expect our work to expand into other science-based issues important to the industry, including topics such as genetics, husbandry, and captive-bred versus wild-caught animals.
The HTI exists to support both the pet industry, from small independent businesses to larger companies, and the pet owners who care for these animals. We believe the best outcomes come from practical, science-informed solutions developed in collaboration with industry, researchers, veterinarians, and regulators.
Thank you again for the helpful comments! If you have any questions about the HTI and its programs, please do not hesitate to reach out!
All the Best,
Matt Gray, President, Healthy Trade Institute, Knoxville, TN
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So you come in to promote yourself but blatantly ignore all the very relevant questions and concerns that were raised… 
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