A Milwaukee woman created a tiny zoo and outreach program to promote reptile adoptions

MILWAUKEE — Tarantulas, snakes, millipedes, geckos, and turtles. They aren’t normally folks’s go-to pets. However one Milwaukee lady desires to persuade you to undertake extra of them.

“They make actually good pets if they’ve the appropriate care too, so yea I like them,” Tatiana Gritvesvskiy mentioned.

Gritvesvskiy is the proprietor of Tatiana’s Tiny Zoo. What began as a YouTube channel has changed into an in-person outreach program designed to loosen up folks’s fears about reptiles, snakes, scorpions, and snakes.

“Not lots of people like them, and that’s okay. But when I may destigmatize them slightly bit and get folks to a minimum of be enthusiastic about them, study some enjoyable information study their pure histories, that may lead them into contemplating them extra and their habitats that they dwell in,” she mentioned.

Gritvesvskiy began the in-person enterprise in November 2022. Her first expedition shall be to the Milwaukee Basis for Independence to do pet remedy.

She’d additionally prefer to go to, “for birthday events, for classroom experiences, senior facilities, libraries issues like that.”

Gritvesvskiy owns 23 animals from scorpions to spiders to lizards to snakes to a ferret and a canine. It began when she labored at a pet retailer a few decade in the past. Somebody introduced in a lizard that they might now not take care of. Whereas the shop didn’t promote or cope with lizards, Gritvesvskiy determined to undertake the lizard. One after the other, her assortment grew till she needed to create a separate room in her dwelling to retailer all of the enclosures.

One of many different objectives of this system is to provide folks in city areas entry to animals they wouldn’t usually encounter.

 “Lots of people don’t have entry to good high quality pure areas of their neighborhood.”

When folks have extra publicity to those animals, they could have a better understanding of the environment as a complete.

Reptiles and bugs are indicator species that means that they’re typically the primary to mirror modifications in an surroundings. If that surroundings suffers air pollution or imbalances, reptiles and bugs die and could be a number of the first to die.

“It is perhaps too late to save lots of that habitat by the point we do discover. In order that’s a extremely essential purpose to get folks to care concerning the creepy crawly animals they could not like a lot.”

You may attain out to Tatiana by means of her Fb web page Tatiana’s Tiny Zoo. She would possibly simply change your thoughts about reptiles and bugs.

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