The Bizzare Life Of Heidi Parr

   Within a week or two, I'll be beginning renovations on an RV which I will eventually move into. Once I finish flipping it, I'll travel the United States and hopefully gather many different breeds of animals in order to achieve my ultimate end goal, to own a pet store. I'm hoping to start one of the only pet stores that focuses on education and keeping the animals safe, happy, and healthy. Hopefully I can arrange it so there are free classes teaching about how to care for certain animals, how to train them, and how to safely breed them. 

   Here's an uncommon opinion for you. Most people are highly against keeping exotic or endangered animals as pets, such as Tigers, Lions, Bears(oh my!), owls, eagles, and so on. I am not. I think that there should certainly be a permit and extensive training required in order to house one, but in order to maintain the existence of an endangered species, you need people to be breeding them. And more people would be breeding them if there was a demand for buying them. Most sanctuaries and breeding programs rely on donations in order to stay afloat, which is really quite risky. All that needs to be done to crash one is for people to lose interest in that specific facility, and it's gone. People argue that Tigers and Lions are kept in poor conditions, but so are many regular house cats and dogs. The simple solution would to be to do what we do with cats and dogs, and take the animal away from bad keepers. Here's another fact that is often shared in a way that makes it sound bad. There are more tigers being kept as pets than there are in Zoo's in the United States. That's an insane fact! That means that private breeding is more successful that the breeding in Zoo's. Basically, the species is surviving partly because people are keeping them as pets! 
   Often times, people assume that the exotic animals people are keeping as pets come strait from the wild, which is far from the truth. They are bred and raised in private collections, handled daily and get a lot of human interaction. 
   After all I've said, I do want to say I'm not trying to encourage you to go out and buy a Lion. I merely am trying to convey that responsible animal keepers with training and legal permission should be able to keep an exotic animal as much as a private Zoo or animal sanctuary can. It could save a species in just a few years. If it were legal in my state, I'd jump through all the hoops to turn my backyard into enclosures for animals such as Panda bears and Tigers, and send half of every breed out to a re-introduction facility. I do apologize if I come across in an unpleasant way, but I am extremely frustrated over the fact that there are only a handful of states that allow exotic pets such as big cats. It really is so easy to save a species from extinction, but people are worried about the dangers of uneducated and inexperienced people buying them and getting harmed, and completely skipping over the solution of working to eliminate the inexperienced from the equation. 

   Now, I'm sure you've had enough of my little rant. If you're still interested, please feel free to peruse through my stash of weird. I've got a lot of things that I want to do in life, and life isn't long so I have a lot of work to do. Hopefully you find one of my many projects interesting!