What About Venomous Animals?

Will MorphMarket ever allow advertising for "hot" snakes? Why, or why not? 

It's an excellent question and the answer is multi-layered. 

First, please understand that we have nothing against venomous snakes or the people who keep them. We have a tremendous amount of respect for anyone that commits to these special animals and takes care of them as they deserve. 

We do allow the sale of some venomous animals such as Gila monsters or certain invertebrates. And several species of common colubrids can be classified as venomous, though their envenomation is not considered "medically significant." 

Truly "hot" snakes, such as vipers and elapids, are in a class all by themselves. In most cases, legally keeping them involves specialized training and/or government permits. There is a tremendous amount of responsibility and potential liability for anyone dealing in hots. 

One of the core tenets of MorphMarket's mission is to provide super-easy access to many different species and sellers but we don't believe the acquisition of venomous snakes should be that easy. We can't, in good conscience, promote a system that allows just anyone to "walk in off the streets" (so to speak) and buy such dangerous animals. One of the things that we have considered, and will continue to keep on the back burner, is figuring out a new system that would allow the advertising of hots while keeping some kind of control over those ads so that they are only available to qualified buyers. How exactly to set that up, and how to identify who is "qualified" has yet to be determined. 

In addition to priority and technical challenges, MorphMarket must deal with a certain amount of "push back" from the general populace, and even from other reptile lovers. Some object to the fact that we offer any animal larger or more threatening than a ball python or corn snake. There are those that don't believe anyone should be keeping or selling exotic animals under any circumstances. We hear from people that are phobic about snakes or other categories we offer. And then there are those that believe we're not doing our job "well enough" because we don't enforce some particular rule or standard that they believe is the "only" way to do things (ie: racks vs naturalistic vivs). Adding venomous snakes to the mix would, without a doubt, multiply the amount of pushback we have to work with by magnitudes. 

For these reasons, it is unlikely that our policy for selling venomous snakes will change soon.