Adopt Sponsor Wild Free Meerkat Meerkats Suricate Suricates Conservation Film Equine Sanctuary Oudtshoorn Western Cape South Africa - Why meerkats / suricates are not good pets

Submitted on Monday, July 05 @ 20:23:55 CEST by Admin

The Meerkat Magic Conservation Project directly conserves wild meerkat / suricate populations and is completely against the exploitation of wildlife and keeping meerkats / suricates as pets, selling them or abusing them in anyway.

The Meerkat Magic Conservation Project does not support the unsustainable and harmful commercial trade of wild meerkats. Or capturing of wild meerkats for pets. No tame meerkats / suricates are worked with at The Meerkat Magic Conservation Project!

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Meerkats / suricates do not make suitable pets, and should be left in the wild where they belong. They are highly sociable mammals that constantly require activity and care - they should be seen more as children and less as pets, as far as the degree of attention they require in captivity is concerned.

When their owners realise how very demanding and destructive meerkats can be in a home with their continuous urge to dig, and how very dependent they are on their owners for everything, the meerkats are often then seen as a liability.

Additionally meerkats / suricates also have a special dietary requirement, including sand and high roughage foods. Captive meerkats are very often obese and very unhealthy due to a totally unsuitable diet and lack of adequate exercise.

Many meerkats / suricates are tragically abandoned after a few short months in captivity.

Wild meerkat / suricate groups have unique scents and will attack and kill rival groups of meerkats who intrude in their territories. Annoyingly, people who keep meerkats illegally as pets in captivity do not realise what will happen once the meerkat / suricate grows up- it is a time bomb waiting to explode through human ignorance of instinctive meerkat behaviour!

The meerkat / suricate will begin to scent mark the area it lives in when it reaches puberty from around six months in captivity and around nine months in the wild. Captive meerkats / suricates imprint on their human owners and treat them like meerkats / suricates from their own group- because they are fed by people.

The Meerkat Magic Conservation Project does NOT feed or protect wild meerkat / suricate populations at all, and wild meerkats / suricate treat the observers here as objects that they trust due to highly selective ethical neuro linguistic programming habituation techniques that require many years to implement and constant care to maintain, this selective trust from wildlife.

Wild meerkats / suricates like this will never bite a human through aggression!

Captive meerkats / suricates however inevitably end up biting human visitors to a meerkat / suricate "home", that the meerkat / suricate scent marks as their territory. The reason this happens is simple- the captive meerkats / suricates think that the human visitors who smell different to the humans who have them in captivity who are seen as meerkats, are treated as rival or intruder meerkat groups, and that is why humans end up getting bitten by captive meerkats / suricates!

Having being raised in an artificial environment, the meerkat / suricate does not even know how to care for itself in the wild.

These abandoned meerkats / suricates make very easy unsuspecting targets to any predator. And without very careful understanding and effort, the rehabilitation of meerkats / suricates with prolonged exposure to domesticity is virtually always a failure. And it is totally unethical to do so.

Additionally wild meerkats / suricates search for missing or captured group members for many days - to use anthropomorphism - the entire group appears to "suffer" from "stress" at a loss of a fellow group member.

The group will call repeatedly, and search for the missing animal's scent by returning to all the recent locations of that animal. It is very "distressing" to the animals. For anybody to wilfully do this to wild meerkats / suricates shows a complete lack of understanding and a lack of respect for wildlife.

Please remember this if you are ever "tempted" to have a meerkat as a "pet". You are only creating a further demand for this lovely intelligent, wild animal to be illegally traded and almost always inevitably abandoned.

If you really like meerkats / suricates, why not show it by supporting the campaign against the meerkat / suricate pet trade.

The Meerkat Magic Conservation Project aims to help put an end to the trade of meerkats / suricates as pets and keeping them in captivity for selfish personal reasons, and not because they have been abandoned and are now looked after by zoos or used in educational displays, which is the only kindness that can be shown to them once removed from the wild...

The Meerkat Magic Conservation Project is creating the opportunity for visitors to support wildlife charities, and rehabilitation centres through their support of wild meerkats / suricates in their natural habitat, living their lives in freedom in territories over six kilometres long, and not in a small enclosure!

If there is a desire to experience meerkats / suricates, there are many worthy rehabilitation centres and zoos that cater for this- there is NEVER a good reason to keep a wild animal in captivity- if you really care about wildlife you will not interfere with nature.

And now for the first time in the world at The The Meerkat Magic Conservation Project, visitors are able to see meerkats / suricates in their natural wild state and learn to respect why they should not be willfully kept in captivity.

Please do not keep meerkats / suricates as pets, or support the unjust and unsustainable trade of meerkats for pets. This is the official view of The Meerkat Magic Conservation Project.

To read another important article about captive meerkats and why they should not be released and fines and prison sentences for illegally keeping meerkats / suricates in captivity press here.