Reptilian pets are increasing in popularity, with the number of households in the United States possessing a pet snake increasing from 810,000 in 2018 to 1.3 million in 2024. This has spurred the industry that supplies care and feeding for those snakes, and has spawned a unique form of factory farming that breeds hundreds of millions of mice and rats annually to feed them. The thing is, unlike animals raised for human food, mice and rats aren’t covered under the Animal Welfare Act, so the operations that produce them have no animal welfare oversight.
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