- This one sucks to cover,
but I feel like it's not talked about very often
and definitely not enough,
and that is the dangers of shipping reptiles.
'Cause a lot of people always have that question,
and I always questioned it myself before ever shipping,
but those who actually do ship animals
never really seem to talk about the deaths
and how frequent that is.
So me and the people I've worked with
have been a part of shipping
I'd estimate around seven to 800 animals,
and of those we've had just about 30 deaths.
That is 25 coming in.
I don't have the exact number, but approximately 25,
and five going out.
So I'm going to talk about what went wrong in these
and how it can be avoided
and actually how dangerous versus safe shipping is.
'Cause the idea of putting a living animal
in a cardboard box and sending it across the country
or across the world is a pretty bizarre idea.
And I had a lot of questions about it,
so hopefully these will answer some of yours
if you have questions as well.
Firstly, let's talk about the animals coming in.
So what I do is you can go
to our site, emeraldscales.com,
and you can buy an intake kit.
And with this kit, we send you everything you need
to ship us your animal,
and we then do the hard work of rehoming it
and possibly rehabilitating it
if there are issues with the animal,
and then we send it out to a new person.
So I don't know the exact number,
but about 250 animals have been shipped in to us,
because before I just got them from local sources,
but now they're all just shipped in.
And of those 250, there's been about 25 deaths,
so that's just about 10 percent,
or one in 10, not surviving, which sounds very high.
It is improving, but the issues
are either people mistakenly
not packing and shipping correctly,
or purposefully completely ignoring our guidelines.
It's very important that an animal is very healthy
when it's being shipped,
because anything that possibly compromises
its body can kill it.
Also, anything that's causing that stress,
the stress on top of shipping can also kill it.
When an animal is shipped,
you can drop it off at FedEx,
at the latest around 8:00 p.m.,
and then it arrives at the arrival location
around 10 or 11:00 a.m.
So normally they're in a box for less than 12 hours,
and this much time is not enough
to stress an animal out from zero stress
to, like, an amount of stress to kill it.
However, if it's already stressed out from something,
whether it's health issues,
environmental issues, or human issues,
the stress from shipping can basically push it
over the edge and kill it.
At least that's what it seems like happens
in our experience.
The number one most common thing
that kills them is a malnourishment.
The animals that have died the most coming in
are leopard geckos.
There's been about 15 or so, just around a dozen.
There's also been about five snakes
and five lizards and tortoises.
Leopard geckos, I think are the most common
because, well, one, they're the most common animal
we get in, so it kind of makes sense.
Two, they're most frequently the ones
that are neglected and sent to us.
They are extremely hardy animals,
which oftentimes goes against its best interests.
Like, a lot of these geckos
would be better off just dying sooner,
but because they have such strong wills to live,
they can survive ridiculous malnourishment,
to the point where people will have them
for months and months,
they're getting worse and worse and worse,
and they finally send it to us,
and they have various ways to lie to us about the condition.
When we ask for pictures,
and people will send old images of the animals
before they got sick,
they'll send images that aren't of their animals,
they'll send images of a different animal,
or they'll just try and completely avoid sending images.
So now, to try and avoid this,
you are required to send a picture
with a written message in the image.
But again, you can still just use another animal,
so it's not a perfect science, but it's gotten better
because those animals that come in, it's instantly.
You can smell it in the box.
It smells like death.
You open it up.
And the thing is,
we usually use heat packs when shipping animals,
which makes animals decompose more quickly.
When an animal decomposes faster,
its gases build up and it begins to bloat in the box.
I won't be too graphic,
but you can imagine what happens when that animal bloats
more than its skin can handle.
And the problem is when this happens,
it's very hard to diagnose what happened during shipping.
But even then, you can still tell
if there's so little matter, basically,
that it was ridiculously malnourished
and neglected or abused by the owner.
So by far, the number one killer of these animals
is simply sending a sick animal.
If you don't do this, we would have, like,
10 to 12 deaths total.
The other issues are mistakes in shipping.
There's been some cases
where people don't secure the heat pack properly.
Basically, when you ship an animal, you take a box,
you put styrofoam in it,
you put padding, paper padding, that they can breathe in.
You then put the animal either in a bag or a container.
You put that in the padding,
you put a heat or cool pack, depending on weather,
or no pack if the weather is good,
and then you put styrofoam on top,
box it up, tape it, label, bring it to FedEx.
You're done.
However, sometimes these heat packs
are not secured properly.
And now we do extra measures to make sure
that even if the heat pack falls,
it does not fall on the animal.
Putting the animal towards the base of the box
with more padding beneath the heat pack
eliminates this likelihood a lot more often,
but there are still some people who don't leave space,
and the pack just touches.
We try to be as clear as possible.
Every time an animal comes in,
like, I'm constantly tweaking the intake message,
making sure it's as clear as possible,
but it's still not a 100 percent perfection.
So if nobody sent sick or dying animals,
and if every single heat pack was secured properly
with those safe measures in place,
there would only be less than 10 deaths in animals.
Again, same things with snakes
that are just too malnourished to survive shipping.
Usually this is ball pythons.
People just wait too long,
and I have a wait list.
I can't take animals immediately.
So sometimes they will send a truly healthy animal,
and by the time I'm find them on the wait list
and have them send,
they won't send updated pictures,
and it turns out it's in worst condition.
So now I might need to start having them send me
new pictures before they send.
But the problem is so many of these people
either, A, don't care about the animal,
or B, don't have the resources to help the animal.
'Cause sending an animal to me,
it still costs you a 100 bucks upfront,
but that is oftentimes cheaper
than even the basic veterinary care.
So they try and still swindle around the process
and send these dying animals.
And yeah, just so few people care.
It's kind of ridiculous.
Like, we don't even have a system set up
for updating people that send animals.
But the very few people that have asked
for updates on animals,
they'll be surprised when I say, like,
oh, like, nobody ever asks for updates.
I'll need to, like, find your animal.
So in the future, I am going to do better
about actually labeling animals to the previous owner.
But I'd say less than five percent ever ask for updates,
and I'd say more than 50 percent don't even care.
They just want to get that burden off of them,
and that's why there's been so many deaths.
So if that didn't happen either,
that would only be those few deaths that have happened
when I send customers animals,
and I'm gonna go over those five more in detail,
'cause I know exactly, like, I have more details.
So since 2018, when I started shipping animals,
there's been two crested geckos that died,
two leopard geckos that died, and a bearded dragon.
So it's actually all lizards.
I don't know think there's any,
like, rhyme or reason in that.
But the first death was very early on, early 2018,
when this whole shipping thing was a brand new process.
It was me and one other person in charge of packing
and shipping animals.
We put them on the calendar,
make sure the weather's good on the forecast,
and then when the day comes,
check weather again to make sure it's safe.
We need temperatures above freezing
because even if it's below freezing
and we have a heat pack,
the heat pack can actually freeze in the box
and then kill the animal.
The very first death we had was purely human error.
And that was because both me and him
thought that the other person
checked the weather for that day.
On the day of shipping,
'cause although the weather was fine a week ago,
the forecast changed so drastically
that it dropped below the thirties,
only for about an hour, but that was enough time
to make the heat pack completely malfunction
and kill that crested gecko.
It's the only time it's happened.
This was over three years ago now
and it's still just always in the back of my mind
every time I'm shipping.
We've never had human error again since sending an animal.
It was that one time, purely mistake, purely my fault.
It hasn't happened again, but that is the one.
And I forgot to tell you the percentage of shipping out.
Like I said, it's been five deaths.
That's just about one percent of animals, or one in 100.
And to me this is low enough
to still justify shipping animals.
Maybe you don't,
but I think that enough animals
have a net positive in the end
to justify that one in a 100 not surviving.
Next up on the list, it was September 2019,
and it was a leopard gecko.
A beautiful, healthy adult.
I think female, but maybe it was male.
The thing about this is, FedEx,
they're allowed to just drop the package off on the porch,
which is perfectly fine.
We always require people to be home.
And this person was home and actually answered the door.
The FedEx person directly gave them the box
and they instantly unboxed it,
and yet the leopard gecko was dead.
This was the first time we had an animal die
under confusing circumstances going out.
Asked about the box,
asked for pictures of the gecko and the box.
The gecko almost looked like it was just asleep,
but it clearly was actually dead.
The box had no dings, no scratches, not banged up.
Everything was in perfect condition.
I did package it correctly.
The heat pack was working.
The weather was fine,
'cause you can check historical weather in any location.
Everything was 100 percent perfect.
The gecko was just dead.
It was totally healthy when it was here.
We had it for months.
Came from a good source, or, like, a source that cared.
It wasn't neglected in the past, and yet it still died.
And this was the realization
that there are going to be those flukes.
Sometimes I don't like saying they're flukes
because there has to be something that went wrong,
whether it was something in a sorting facility,
maybe there was some sort of blunt trauma.
I feel like that would happen more often
if that was the case, because I could be wrong,
but I feel like shipping services
have such consistent techniques to do everything,
except the US Postal Service.
I hate the US Postal Service,
but FedEx and UPS seem to be so consistent in what they do.
It would really surprise me if there are those flukes,
but something happened that killed this leopard gecko.
Still don't know what it was.
In April of 2020, there was a juvenile bearded dragon.
Almost identical thing.
It was perfect weather, no problems.
It wasn't directly handed to the person,
but it was left in a safe spot
and they direct, like, immediately picked it up
once they got the notification that it had arrived.
The beardy was simply dead.
There was no signs of trauma, nothing.
Same thing as the leopard gecko.
There were six months of shipping
tons of animals with no issues,
and then all of a sudden this beardy came
and just died with the new owner.
No idea why, but that's on the list.
And it was actually a sibling of, I think,
five other bearded dragons.
They were all shipped perfectly, no problem.
All different locations, but again,
the weather was fine,
and we shipped it, I've shipped to every state,
other than Alaska and Hawaii, multiple times,
and it's all been good.
Then in mid-2020, there was an adult crested gecko.
He arrived very lethargic to the owner.
The box was in good condition,
but he was acting very off and very sluggish.
So this one was the owner's fault.
I can almost guarantee it.
The problem was our terms and conditions at the time
did not protect us,
because I said there was a live arrival guarantee,
and that's basically it.
Now, if there is a death,
you have to email us within 30 minutes
of that FedEx notification.
This person emailed us about four hours afterwards,
and it turns out while it was lethargic and not doing well,
they handled it almost the entire time.
It was a younger, I think it was a teenager.
This is fine.
You have to be 18 or older,
or do it with a person that's 18 or older
to place an order and everything,
but it's fine if a teen owns the animal and, like,
is the primary caretaker.
However, they just kept handling it.
It was doing badly.
They'd then email us hours and hours later
saying it's dead, and I have to refund them.
Like, I would lose the bank thing.
But the thing is this doesn't matter anyway.
The gecko's dead.
This is a gecko we had for a long time.
Super healthy adult male, was always perfect,
so this was basically something happened during shipping
that either stressed him out or caused him some trauma.
The owner then completely added to that
by touching him a bunch.
It's said that when it arrives, you need to let it chill.
You need to watch it, give it water,
give it a quiet space to just chill out
in case there's any stress.
But this person ignored all that,
and then instantly went to Petco or PetSmart
and bought a crested gecko.
So that was a little punch in the face from that customer.
We get lots of recurring customers.
We also have a blacklist.
The blacklist is increasingly long.
You may be on it. (laughs)
Probably not.
There's not that many people on it,
but I'd say there's, like,
30 or 40 people on the black list.
Okay, I guess that's a lot, actually.
These are mostly people that never actually got an animal.
I'd say on the blacklist there's only, like,
two people that actually got an animal.
The rest are just people that did such a bad job
talking to us or trying to prove a healthy enclosure
that they got canceled and then blacklisted,
'cause a lot of people will get canceled
and then keep buying new animals trying to get them sent,
so that's a tangent, but yeah.
Every customer that's actually gotten an animal,
almost all of them have been perfect, so.
And then November of 2020 was the most recent death.
Same thing as before.
Perfectly healthy adult male leopard gecko
had just arrived dead for absolutely no reason
that I could figure out.
So of this list, one was human error on my part.
One I would argue as human error on the owner's part,
and three were those completely fluke mishaps.
So yeah, that's everything that happened.
Basically, the summary of this, I'm looking at my notes
'cause I don't want to miss anything.
So, if an animal is in great health,
if all temperatures at both locations
are above 38 degrees Fahrenheit
at the coolest point of the night,
if the heat pack is secured properly
and there is that padding between the animals,
if the styrofoam is assembled correctly,
if all the pieces are remembered,
and if the box is taped well
to make sure nothing falls out,
I would say there is a nearly 100 percent chance
the animal is going to arrive in perfect condition,
so close to a hundred percent.
It's just of these over 700 animals
that we've processed and everything,
it's been those three deaths that we just do not understand.
All of the others were either human error
on the person sending its fault,
human error on my fault with the crested gecko,
or human error on the animal arriving
and not being handled properly.
Past that, I would argue
that shipping reptiles and amphibians
is an extremely safe process if you do it properly.
I'm not talking about pet stores
that get them shipped in hundreds
or even just dozens in a box, all stuffed together.
I'm talking sending one animal from one person
to another person, or multiple.
I mean, I've shipped up to,
I think like 15 have come in in the same box.
As long as their instructions are followed,
everything goes perfectly.
There's been about 200 species shipped with us
and it has been great.
It's just been these few,
but I think that's what you should know
about the shipping process.
It can go wrong, but it's very unlikely
if everything is done well.
So hopefully some extra transparency for you.
This is something that I would have liked
to be able to watch before shipping myself.
It might've been a bit long, but I waned to be thorough.
If you have any questions about shipping,
you can just leave 'em in the comments.
I'll answer here.
You can also ask me through Patreon,
where I actually see your messages directly,
'cause I can't really answer DMS and emails and stuff
about that stuff, but yeah, that's everything.
Let me know your experiences shipping
and receiving animals, everything,
what sellers did good or wrong or whatever in the comments.
That's it for this sadder but important topic.
I'm Alex, and thanks for watching.
(upbeat music)