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By Pedro Romero-Vidal, Guillermo Blanco, Jomar Barboas, Martina Carrete, Fernando Hiraldo, Erica Pacífico, Abraham Rojas, Alan O. Bermúdez-Cavero, José Díaz-Luque, Rodrigo León-Pérez, and Jose Tella.

Read the full paper here.

Zoonoses, i.e. infectious diseases transmitted from animals to humans, constitute a major risk for human, livestock and wildlife health. In recent years, we have witnessed zoonotic outbreaks with devastating consequences such as Evola, SARS or MERS. Most studies on this topic have highlighted the risk of wildlife markets for cross-species disease transmission. However, in many parts of the world people frequently keep poached wild animals as pets, which could pose a health risk.

To understand the magnitude of this problem, we conducted a continental-scale survey of rural human settlements over 13 years in 15 Neotropical countries, where the keeping of wild animals as pets is strongly rooted. On these surveys, we documented the vast extent of poaching to meet the local demand for pets, resulting in thousands of families living with ca. 275 species of wild animals (more than 10,000 individuals detected only in our surveys) without any sanitary controls. Parrots, for example, accounted for ca. 80% of wild pets and people live very closely with them, keeping them in their homes. This, which could be an amusing anecdote, is worrying when one considers that most of these animals die of disease at an average age of one year and are almost immediately replaced by other animals that follow the same fate. But disease transmission also has a reverse direction, as a significant number of wild animals kept as pets escape into the wild (almost a third of the individuals that people consider to be lost were due to escapes). These individuals, who have lived closely with poultry, may in turn have contracted diseases that they will now transmit to wild populations, some of which have significant conservation problems. 

In short, the practice of keeping wild animals as pets, which is widespread and culturally rooted in the Neotropics but also in other highly populated and rural areas such as some Asian countries, represents a major risk for human health and biodiversity conservation. Halting this illegal activity and strengthening health surveillance of animals and people in close contact with poached pets would benefit both people and wildlife.