The third pillar of a strong community is the sheer number of members. The math is simple. The more people you have, the higher your purchasing power is and the higher your political power is. The more money the community spends the more services will be built up around that spending. The larger the reptile community the more Exotic veterinarians will be added to vet offices. You know how hard it is to find a reptile vet, much less a chameleon experienced vet? The bigger the reptile community gets the easier that will be. The bigger the community the more business can be supported beyond just critical medical services of an exotic vet. We can now support tour groups to Madagascar. Birders have been doing this for decades. And we can get businesses catered directly for us. Case in point, the chameleon community was big enough that the Dragon Strand Chameleon Caging Company was able to develop. Because of that, an entire new category of hybrid mid and high end chameleon cages was created. Before that it was cheap, screen cages only. So our size benefitted the community by creating product availability that did not exist before. Because of that, the community now has Dragon Ledges which is a patented Dragon Strand product that allows you to mount branches and plants to the sides of screen cages. We are big enough to support innovation that serves us specifically. Even more importantly, we are big enough to support innovation in features rather than in just cost savings. What that means is that a company can dump R&D money into a product to make it perform better and/or to make it cheaper. Mass market cage companies will almost always dump R&D money into making something cheaper. They are catering to the general populace who is not experienced enough to know what quality to look for. So their innovation is to make the product as cheap as possible. Companies from within the community are much more likely to invest money into making a better product. I know that is what I do. The size of our community directly affects the businesses and support that are tailored for our needs.

And politics, the reptile world is big enough to have USARK which is a political office that protects our rights to keep reptiles. And they have no down time. Take a look at their website and you can see what is going on all the time. There is a constant onslaught of legislation designed to criminalize reptile keeping. It is community size that generates enough money to keep USARK going and is able to create enough noise that politicians listen. Size is what allows us to fight back in what is literally a life and death fight for our community.

Growing our community is an important part of our survival. But we must grow it the right way, with the welfare of the reptiles, amphibians, an invertebrates as our primary focus. Because that is growing in strength.

So there is huge benefit to us encouraging reptile ownership. Now, I understand that reptile or jumping spider or hissing cockroach keeping is not for everyone and I am not saying we should be out there recruiting. I am saying that when people show up on our social media doorstep that we treat them with as much respect as we can and welcome them into the community. We will always have those community members that need to put down the freshman class to feel like they know something. It is up to us seniors to temper that and be an example as to how newcomers should be treated. Here is where perspective comes into play. Social media has allowed us to sequester ourselves into corners where it seems like our little community is the entire world. And we play out all of our human drama within that confined space. All of the ego fluffing, jealousy, politics, good will, helpfulness, compassion, everything that makes up us as human beings is played out on this miniature stage as if the world around us did not exist. We fight each other because, well, humans fight. If we don’t have a common enemy to join forces against we find an enemy within our community because humans seem to need to always being fighting something. It is those of us who manage groups that have to have the perspective that there is a larger world around us that would like us to disappear. They are doing everything possible to choke us out while we fling mud at each other. It is up to us in the leadership roles to look outside our communities and keep the perspective that the more we work together and the larger our community is the stronger we will be to justify services, specialty products, and political protection.

Of course, how we grow is just as important as growing. Growing our community is an important part of our survival. But we must grow it the right way, with the welfare of the reptiles, amphibians, an invertebrates as our primary focus. Because that is growing in strength.