Overview

As most people who keep exotics know it is 100% critical to the overall welfare of your animals to make sure that you do a decent amount of research before aquiring any pet. This page will go over my own workflow of research i do before hand.

Dont's

Most i have come across have been guilty of doing this at some point in there travels through the hobby and thats on a whim getting an animal without doing the deeper research including myself, i have done this with invertibrates and tarantulas its a slippery slope to go down,Dont just go "ah well i know they need this enclosure size i have one spare and i know they need this substrate and ive got this spare but im not to sure on lighting." stop yourself right there and leave the website or shop you are purchasing the animal from and fill in the gaps in your knowledge beforehand do the best for your animals before the aquisition it will releave uneeded stress for the animals and for yourself in the long term. dont just get animals do the research, below will go through what i believe is each phase of this.

Preparations (Surface level)

My first port of call now is looking at what has already been written and said online about an animal, there are a bunch of amazing websites that have loads of information about certain species of exotic animals, go through atleast a website and decide weather i am interested in the species or not. Its suprising how many rabbit holes i go down and hours of research i do and then realise im not acctually interested in keeping the animal. This first step is not even the bare minimum you should do im my opinion before aquiring a pet.

Preparations (Diving down)

So you have done your surface level learning, you have looked at a couple of websites and decided the animal you have found if 100% for you, Great thats an awesome step towards providing the best welfare for your animal you can.

The next step is to dive down a bit further, join a few reptile groups eaither on facebook or reptile forums such as reptileforums.co.uk, you dont even have to comment just observe peoples posts, if your interested this is pretty natural if your scrolling through facebook you will just naturally read the infor people post without even thinking, from here you get an more concise overview of the general public and how people take care of there animals, this isnt a difinitive to follow but if you have basic critical thinking skills you can develop these techniques into defining your own care requirements for your new pets. Also read some more care guides and bare in mind what you are reading there are alot of very static care guides that tell you to do things in a certain way, unless this is backed by science use your critical thinking skills to determine whether its something relevent to your own animal care situaltion, not everything you read online will be right for you or 100% right in general including my own guides.

Then the next thing to do is do make all the purchases and preparations for your new pet, make sure you know there requirements for there home and at the minimum there nessesities to get started such as basic therostats,

This step in my opinion is the essential step you need to make before commiting.

Ongoing learning (Deep self learning)

This is the pinical of learning about your animals, if you do this you have got alot further than most, firstly after learning about tempratures and humidity requirements for your animals and enviroments most people stick to what a few websites tell them and dont go any further, however if you want to excel and constatly learn about your animal you should do the following:

• Search for the ranges and enviroments your animals live in in the wild
• Check out the humidity and tempratures that your animals experience in the wild
• Learn about the plants and wildlife that your animals share there enviroment with.
• Create a plan for temprature fluctuations and humidities to set your thermostats to throughout the year.
• Read research articles about the species you keep

Ongoing learning (Notes)

This isnt for everyone and i know that everyone learns in different ways some of us pick up knowledge like a sponge in our heads others like myself rely on notes written down, there are applications such as husbandry.pro that allow you to track all sorts of important data about your animals or just a pen and paper if your old school. Watch your animals and learn from there behaviours.