Animal Planet seems to be attacking the reptile and exotic animal industries in an extremely misleading and untruthful way. As a member of this community I am deeply saddened and offended by the gross mischaracterizations of mental illness and irresponsibility of the members of my community. No community or group of like-minded individuals are without their “black eye”, but to insinuate and even downright state that the entire community is similar to the outliers is irresponsible and borders on libelous.

Therefore, I will not support Animal Planet by watching their programming or support the companies who advertise on Animal Planet until the programming is pulled, or at least becomes balanced and truthful. Should you decide to pull your commercials from these segments of their programming, or from Animal Planet altogether, please let me know so I may resume supporting your business.

Statistically the occupational risks of keeping reptiles are no greater than that of keeping and working with most domestic animals and livestock. If not, even less. Horses kill an average of ~90 people per year. Dogs killed 33 people in 2005. But yet one has to wonder why AP is not calling our love of dogs or horses a “fatal attraction” or why they are not calling dog lovers “mentally deficient.
According to “Fatal Attractions”, anyone that keeps 2 or more animals is now by default a hoarder with mental deficiencies? That’s a new one to me. What I am wondering is, do any of these people making such statements on the show have any actual training in making such medical diagnoses? To me, the phrase “I may not be a psychologist, but I play one on TV” comes to mind.

See these statistics below: http://www.rexano.org/Statistics/Death_Odds_Exotic_Animal_2005.pdf

http://www.rexano.org/Statistics/venomous_captive_snake_fatality.pdf

I think showing these horrible events serves a purpose , wild animals belong in the wild .Dogs and horses have been domesticated , true there may be more incidents with dogs but there are millions of dogs out there , the% must be small.And horses and man have a long history , for a long time everything men built was on the back of horses not to mention the travel aspect.So I think you can’y compare domestic and wild animals though , these big cats , primates and reptiles are still very much wild animals and just doing what they do thats the difference , for domestic animals its truly out of character for wild animals its in character to attack and kill.