So the past two days have been very interesting for me personally. I was told, when I post ‘just a link’ on the social networks as I have been doing for many years, that this is shall we say ‘offensive’ to some. I was told, people wanted the fast answer to their reptile question. The what do I do now? Oh and by the way I don’t have money to do X, Y, Z so I need a different way to solve for problem A.
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I was informed that when I post links without a few sentences to describe what the article is about then I’m being ‘uppity and arrogant.’ Now the article links I post come with a preview generally. This same person believed too that their hypothesis was proven because they’d help build a reptile page and it got almost ‘no traffic’. When informed of the traffic we receive they told me this
“The only reason you get craploads of traffic is because you post your links everywhere.”
Let that sink in before I explain something. No seriously, take a moment and really let that wriggle into your mind.
Ok back now? When I informed said individual about the fact that
“Most of my traffic actually comes from search engines”
That was when the uppity and arrogant part came up (the individual considers me to be ‘Uppity and arrogant’). Later that day, I went with some colleagues to get feeders and meet another person who is respected in the reptile world for his work. I spoke with one of my colleagues and as I was explaining the story above one of them said to me.
‘I got to be honest John, I felt the same way for awhile. Then I went and forced myself to read a couple of your articles and they were good.’ (the person who said this admitted they were not much of a reader but more a hands on experience type)
This got me to thinking, one of the people who commented in the conversation which took place said something like (and I’m paraphrasing here)
‘It’s not even my issue and I took the 2 minutes to read the article. Are people really that lazy?’
I wanted very badly to be snarky and reply but the other party was already on another criticism run of why I am doing things wrong. I think it safe to say that I agreed (the other party didn’t agree) that the other party and I were simply not going to see eye to eye on this subject. Rather than let this impact me personally and what I and my team do I decided to write about it and explore some factors that my team and I have covered a number of times.
Over the course of the three years that the Reptile Apartment Group has existed we’ve talked about the ‘disenchantment’ of the reptile industry below are a few of those pieces.
There have been more which you can see in the Musings of the Herp Father. With the above being said I can say over the years I have been seeing more and more people wanting the ‘fast fix answers’ to their issues which arise with reptile keeping I even said in the Disposable Pet Nation piece
“We joke about spending ten minutes to find the remote rather than walking across the room to change the channel on the television itself. So how can we ask someone to engage in such an intimate act as reading a book?”
I would love for people to buy our books & reports that we write of course. However, that is as I said a very intimate act of wilfulness. Some folks are just not into reading, I get that, while it doesn’t make sense to me I still get it. To me, reading is something I enjoy immensely. This is not about me though.
This is about the ‘customer’ who comes to our site(s) looking for information. Something I want to make very clear before moving on. If reading a book is an intimate act; what is owning a reptile or any pet for that matter? If you’re not willing to take the time to research and develop the knowledge of care needed to keep your pet then maybe you shouldn’t own one.
Let’s be honest though, things happen no matter what we do. Reptiles and pets of any kind can get sick. Generally speaking, when seen immediately by a qualified reptile vet after original purchase and then kept properly, in my experience the reptile will live a completely healthy life and not have any issues. Something else though comes into play, I’ve never had to deal with this but there is sometimes a lacking availability of reptile veterinarian services in some areas. A colleague of mine covered this in Reptile Vet Awareness.
Just recently, another colleague whom I highly respect has opened a business in order to remedy the issue of people not having the availability of a reptile veterinarian. Jordan Russell is releasing Model Herpetoculturist Program where you can now have various services performed at low-cost which don’t require the reptile be seen in the office of a veterinarian. So we’ve resolved some of the issues but not all of them.
We still have those individuals who are wanting the quick fix, don’t want to read, or simply don’t have the time to read a few thousand words. Here’s the interactive part of this. Below you will see a short poll, we want to know your opinion. We did a survey about a year or so ago and discovered not many people listened to radio shows (podcasts).
Technology is changing daily we all know that. So we are considering a new podcast (internet radio show)/possibly video series which would be based around the captive care of reptiles for those who aren’t into reading. To add to this we are considering putting together the Best Practices of Herpetoculture which would be a book of collected views from the ‘Named Breeders’ within herpetoculture many of whom essentially made this the industry we know and love today. Please fill out the poll below share it with your friends, colleagues, and anyone who owns a reptile and let’s see what we can do.