Hey guys, thank you so much for all of the love and support. You guys remind me what this community is about and what it should always be.
To those of you that have reached out to me, i see you, and i am working to get replies out as soon as i can. Please allow me some time to respond. I get overwhelmed easily and that can slow things down a good bit on my end. I am taking the time to give out detailed, thoughtful replies to every one of you. And thank you again so much for reaching out and offering an ear, your help, checking in, etc. It means so so so much to me i cannot tell you.
There isn’t a whole lot of positive community up here in Washington, i don’t know what’s up with that, but it’s true. The best people are hidden away in their private collections or breeding facilities, not interacting with their fellow keeper. Pair that with the typical drama that you can always expect to encounter in any industry, that never shuts up, and what you get is a disconnected community with a lot of bad apples dominating the culture.
Maybe it’s because we coastal northerners don’t talk to eachother all that much in general. Seattle freeze and all that. But it’s always been my pleasure first and foremost to witness and participate in a community of people that do talk to eachother, actually get to know eachother, and look out for one another when the going gets tough. You guys are the highlight of this hobby and i hope y’all never stop.
Unfortunately, when it rains it pours. And it’s looking like a hurricane over here. I’d be lying if didn’t admit that a part of the reason i haven’t been as active on here is due to the feeling of shame and failure that i have been battling with throughout this whole situation. I’ve been holding onto my animals by the skin of my teeth, and the problem with that is how easy it is to drop something that’s slipping.
I swear, life can be so hard. I don’t gotta preach about that. But as a proud and stubborn person by nature, admitting that my abilities to fulfull commitments that i made in earnest is compromised, due to something as trivial as a circumstance, is like forcing myself to drink a bowl of boiling lava.
Hard times end, good times come back eventually. But living beings don’t. And that’s also what’s hard.
I have come to love my animals for so much more than just what they are. The color of their skin, the rarity of the species, genetic potential… That’s nothing. The living being that i interact with day to day? That’s priceless. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
I raised some of these animals from snakelet to adult. I have seen them grow into individuals that stole my heart. Shy, inquisitive, quirky, willful, sweet, downright adorkable. I never thought i could fall for a reptile like i have now. But i have.
So when the going gets tough, they get fed before I do. I remember back in my first apartment, little studio on Hoyt Avenue, when winter came my job cut my hours down to just two days a week. I ate one meal a day to keep them fed. My family didn’t like it when they found out, and i get it. But i just don’t know when to quit.
I don’t know, this is probably all a bit much, but i just don’t know. What i do know is that rent prices keep going up while wages get worse and nobody wants to rent to a reptile keeper. In an economy where owning a home is treated as an investment rather than a necessity, with prices no average young adult can obtain on their own even with a good wage, overtime, and hard, hard work, expecting every reptile owner to own a home or don’t keep is unreasonable at best, and an attack on the reptile community’s foundational demographic, the average keeper, at worst. I think that’s something we as a community need to be talking about way more than we currently are.
I wouldn’t be in this situation to start with if it wasn’t for the prejudice people have against my animals. I don’t want to toot my own horn, but I’m a damn good keeper. I LOVE my animals like my children. And good keepers like me are being driven out of the hobby by the thousands at the hands of the housing market’s prejudice. Matter of fact, one of the animals in my care came from someone else, just like me, who ended up in the same situation. Haku was in a good home. His first owner was a good keeper who knew her stuff. How many animals have to loose good, loving homes over this? I don’t want to hide my animals. They deserve the same comforts and access to pet parks and enrichment opportunities as any other animal. Snakes make BETTER apartment pets than any other commonly kept animal and I’m tired of the hypocrisy.
What blows me away is that even with a great credit score, a legitimate ESA letter, fantastic rental history, (with anyone who gave me a chance) a stable and respectable income, hefty rental insurance, a triple pet deposit, pet resumes, reptile refrences, AND lock secured venomous level caging, i still cannot find housing with my animals. They don’t even give me a chance, they hear snake and hang up.
I don’t understand why this is not being adressed within the community. I want to change that.
Pets need homes. They need to be allowed to stay in their original, loving homes. There’s too many homeless reptiles as it is, and that’s only getting worse.
I don’t know, I’ve just been dancing this jigg too long to not talk about it’s part in the scope of things that’s got me here. I just wish things weren’t so hard for the kids like us, who came up from nothing. Even without pets to look after.
At the end of a hard day, these animals are what keeps me going. I hate being an American. Knowing that it’s my American nightmare that facilities other people’s American dream. People with the rights and resources to create a monopoly over my essentials, who only care about me about as far as my potential to make them more money.
I’m autistic, i can’t handle injustice. It makes no sense to me how some people can treat other people like livestock animals and not even bother to give them a good enclosure. Only treating us like individuals with control over our own lives when it’s convenient to avoid accountability.
It makes my skin crawl. Makes me question why i do any of this. I’m already disadvantaged enough, what with the disabilities, lack of familial support due to a poor economic lot, the Autism and the fact that I’m a girl. (Which makes it way way harder to obtain proper treatment for autism, if you’re wondering why that matters.)
Makes it hard to keep going.
But my snakes make it easier. They are my little joy. (My special interest, which i think should come with some disability related protections for all autistics since a special interest is literally the most important thing in an autistics health and happiness. …Which you may have been able to conclude for yourself, given how i talk about them.)
For them, i can keep going.
I think that’s also a big part of the reason why i can’t imagine loosing them… why i would starve myself to keep them happy if times got tough.
Yet again, I don’t know. I spend too much time thinking about things, I suppose.
But if you love 'em, let 'em go. And i will if it’s for their best. I just don’t know what i would even do without snakes in my life. I was just a kid when I got José. Young and lost, with nothing to my name, but a rental room, some clothes, a borrowed mattress from family, and some donated dishes from the local church. I built all i have with my bare hands. I built it for them. They made me a better person… Not keeping snakes would be like drifting…
Sorry this is so long, and a lot of sharing. But i value open honesty and i think there’s a lot we all can learn from other people’s lived experiences. It would be cool if i might convince you to think a bit about housing, and those other more invisible or intangible enemies to our hobby. Maybe one day i might see more than one video about it by GoHerping on YouTube if it was discussed more often and with the gravity i feel it deserves.
I don’t know why I’m so verbose in text form, but I’ve definitely written some novellas on here. Glad I’m not the only one. 