It’s baby season at the Houston SPCA’s Wildlife Center of Texas. Rabbits the size of one’s palm sit huddled inside their plastic homes, nibbling on lettuce and snuggling into fleece pouches as they await release. Volunteers chat as they grasp tiny daredevil squirrels, their wriggling disrupting the syringes full of milk that make up their daily meals. Despite the critters’ deceptively vice-like grips and ability to shake off a fall from treetops, holding their thin frames is a lesson in miniature on nature’s preciousness.

These small creatures are not that unusual in the animal realm, but the Houston area is full of rescues where way more exotic specimen roam.

“Exotic pets” broadly refers to either uncommon pets—chinchillas, sugar gliders, iguanas—or wild animals kept as pets, such as bears, big cats, and wolves. Jessica Coleman of Lumpy Lizard Reptile, Poultry, and Exotics Rescue runs a sanctuary just shy of three acres in Edna, about 26 miles northwest of Victoria. An estimated 50 percent of its rescues come from the Greater Houston area. Lumpy Lizard has rescued and rehomed 122 animals to date, and that number does not include the 100 permanent sanctuary residents who can neither be adopted nor released into the wild for both their own safety and the safety of the local ecology.

The number of individual intake calls has gone down over time since Lumpy Lizard opened in 2019, but the size of the intakes themselves has increased due to the exotic pet trade. “People are calling and saying, ‘Can you take these nine animals?’ Not, ‘Can you take this animal?’” Coleman says.

She notes that iguanas, tegus, bearded dragons, and chameleons—“a very advanced pet”—are some of the most common exotic reptiles rescued from the Houston area. Many are voluntarily surrendered by owners overwhelmed with their care, while others are found abandoned, left to fend for themselves. Coleman believes large pet store chains place profits ahead of animal welfare, selling reptiles, birds, and other exotic pets to people who aren’t properly educated or equipped to care for them.

“A lot of my intakes are, ‘Hey, we got this guy at PetSmart. They told us this was all he needed. I did some research and it turns out, he’s going to be really expensive to keep,’” Coleman says. “In order for them to properly vet owners, they have to properly educate themselves… There are individuals within those places that really are doing what they think is right and try to help people the best they can. But when you’re in a corporate situation, you’re going to have corporate results. It’s going to be about making money in the end.”

Profiteering at the expense of animal health and safety is also a concern for purely wild animals pressed into service as pets, occasionally as entertainment. Huntsville’s Bears Etc. opened in 2017 with an emphasis on neglected and abused ursine companions. Unlike reptiles, bear owners are far less likely to free their victims into the wild, but that doesn’t mean no harm is being done. Many of them suffer from arthritis from a lifetime walking on concrete, or have their lives cut short after getting euthanized or sold to hunting grounds when they’re no longer profitable.

Kati Krouse, founder and executive director of Bears Etc., notes that bears are hard to rescue from the traveling circuses, tourist traps, and for-profit petting zoos that primarily employ them. She estimates that about 900 bears in the United States need rehoming into a safe environment, but extraction is near impossible.

“There’s really nowhere for them to go unless it’s an emergency situation,” Krouse says. “Right now, if they’re in a bad situation, but still getting food, water, and shelter, they’re housed in place until an opening arises... They climb and they’re strong. And they’re really smart, like elephants and primates and big cats or dogs. They’re very difficult to place and are the least served in the exotic pet trade.”

At the moment, the Bears Etc. campus doesn’t house any bears due to space constraints. Bears require at least 20 acres, and they only have three to spare. Krouse and her team have worked on five rehoming projects for bears; multiple big cat, bird, and reptile rescues; and have advised on projects meant to reintroduce black bears into their native East Texas habitats. Right now, 80 rescue birds and reptiles call the Bears Etc. sanctuary home, including some invasive parakeets left over from a shocking 2020 release of 100 of them in West Houston’s Archbishop Joseph A. Fiorenza Park.

“It’s illegal to release a potentially invasive species to the spread of disease,” Krouse says. “We were able to capture and take home 56, which was all of them that were still alive as we were doing the rescue. We watched as the peregrine falcons took out some of them. Raccoons had gotten some of them overnight, before people knew that they were there.”

Giving exotic pets away when their needs can no longer be properly met is the more ecologically sustainable option than dropping them off into the wild. An example: According to the Texas Invasive Species Institute, green iguanas, which are native to Southern Mexico, Central America, and South America in a range from Ecuador to Brazil, are known to “push out native lizards and insects” in Florida and Puerto Rico, where they’ve become especially devastating to the local environments. Hard freezes in Texas help mitigate some of the potential damage, but that doesn’t eliminate the issue entirely.

To reduce the stress on rescues and keep the environment more stabilized, Coleman encourages people wanting to nurture exotic pets to do thorough research into what is involved in caring for them before making the commitment. She also notes that donations to exotic pet rescues are always appreciated, especially since these rescues don’t get as many funding grants as others do.

Krouse also espouses a boycott of establishments such as cub petting operations and roadside attractions that profit off of animal exploitation, saying, “If the laws can’t shut them down, dollars will.”

Education is empowerment when it comes to doing right by both exotic pets and local wildlife alike. The HSPCA's Wildlife Center of Texas only deals with native species, though they’ll sometimes get calls from concerned Houstonians to come rescue an animal that genuinely belongs in our wilds. Similarly, invasive species won’t necessarily get called in because people mistake them for belonging here.

Wildlife Center of Texas director Brooke Yahney points out that the city has a feral peacock problem, thanks—once more—to the exotic pet trade. The birds rarely get rescued since citizens assume they’re local and don’t call to ask what needs to be done to have them removed and placed somewhere safer.

The Wildlife Center of Texas conducts community outreach programs throughout the year, and Yahney and her team invite Houstonians to come volunteer at the facilities and get to know the difference between indigenous and invasive species. Doing so helps preserve resources so the center can focus on its actual priorities and outsource intaking, handling, and rehoming to the proper rescues if necessary. Yahney also notes that abandoning unwanted pets into the wild, exotic or not, is an act of cruelty for more than just the local species the action displaces.

“That’s so awful, both for the environment and for that animal,” she says. “A lot of times, that animal’s not conditioned to live in these environments, or they have predators that they might not be used to trying to evade. So a lot of times that’s a death sentence for that animal.”

It can also be a death sentence to the tiny squirrels and rabbits that nest in Houstonians’ yards and often end up needing rescuing themselves. More standard pets such as dogs and cats pose more significant threats to these small animals than exotics due to their sheer numbers. Yahney doesn’t have exact data, though she estimates that 20 percent of the center’s intakes were injured by pet dogs and cats.

Her advice to Houstonians? Whether kept as pets or allowed to live in their native habitats, she says, “be mindful of wildlife.”