Mammals on MM?

I’ve noticed there’s really nothing like MorphMarket for mammals. There’s one website but it gets almost zero traffic and is basically hidden from search engines as far as I can tell. Has MorphMarket ever considered a mammals section?

MorphMarket has only really started expanding things along with the explosion of newcomers to the hobby during the pandemic. So things have been going on in the background, but just may not have been announced yet. For example, they have been talking about implementing a section for users to sell or trade products and such. There’s a lot of things that need to be planned ahead of time. This has been ongoing for a long while now and we haven’t heard much about when that will go live.

The other issue I feel may pop up is just that mammals (and birds) are much more regulated in some ways. They also are not as easy to ship and transfer as most reptiles/amphibians are… Or even the expanded inverts, fish and plants.

They can also be an issue with the transfer of zoonotic disease they can carry. I’ve never had a case of salmonella from owning my reptiles, but I have had psittacosis because of a sick bird in my care. A child died of rat bite fever in my area and the animal’s breeder was also supplying the store I worked as well as the rival big box shop. When things go bad with sick mammals and birds it can get bad fast.

If I had to guess, the answer is no, because it’s not a viable thing.

I don’t think a MorphMarket-style concept would be what most mammal breeders are looking for, for one. The mammal breeders I’ve known are pretty specific about how they do things, and it’s not really in line with how the reptile/amphibian/invert/aquatics people do it. They know their target markets and don’t produce animals the way herp folks do.

As mentioned by @armiyana, there’s also a lot more regulation involved for many mammals, as well as a higher degree of scrutiny and oversight in general. There are more rules regarding how and where they can be moved, things like vaccinations, disease testing, & other paperwork/permits may be required. Additionally, for smaller mammal species, there is no easy way to ship them. They must either be picked up from the breeder/seller, or delivered either by the breeder/seller or a specialty courier, if one even exists. Larger species can be flown via airline, but that’s about it. You can’t just pop a rabbit in a box and mail it across the country. None of the shipping providers that take reptiles/inverts/aquatics allow mammals at all.

On top of all of that, there’s the optics. There are a lot of mammal breeders who likely would not be comfortable listing their animals for sale on a platform that also sells things that eat mammalian prey. While some are understanding that everything needs to eat, and will sell their livestock or deadstock as feeders, there are plenty more that do not want to be associated in any way with our hobby because of negative stereotypes and personal opinions regarding what gets used as food.

Mammals are difficult to ship.

But birds! Birds would work! AND Clint says all birds are reptiles, so it fits thematically as well!

What about a category for food for reptiles? I’m having trouble finding such a resource.

MorphMarket at the moment does not have a category for reptile food/frozen feeders. If you are in the US there is a wide variety of other reptile food suppliers online you can order from to have food shipped.

What I’m hearing is that a category for birds is at least on the table! :wink:

I don’t see any benefit from expanding into other categories either to existing users or the site itself. A real risk is that the site loses whatever cred it has from doing one thing better than other sites. Anyone who has compared a real reptile expo ( before all the 3 d printed toys and similar fluff) with an all-animal expo will see the risk here. I’ve vended reptiles at an all animal expo, and it is a joke.

Honestly, even some of the non-ball python categories are shoehorned into the ball python mindset in ways that do them little good, such as using tags similarly for morphs and locales. The taxonomy of some existing categories is a mess, to the point that I won’t use the auto filled Lacey labels since they’re wrong. And keeping up with legal issues would take knowledgeable staff in each category. Adding a completely foreign higher taxon won’t help any of that, since attention from everyone would be spread that much more thinly.

Folks, I am making the executive decision to close this topic. It has been answered and that answer is not going to change so there is no need for extra discussions or necro-raising. If you have other discussions you would like to have about strictly reptile related categories then feel free to start new threads for those

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