Small Exotic Farm is yet small, but growing collection of exotic animals with primary focus on invertebrates. Formally this collection was established in 2013, but then we realised that we can do much more than just enjoying our hobby quietly. And starting from 2017 we are focusing not only on breeding/rearing of our insects, but also on popularisation of animals we are so passionate about.

Actually if you need a hobby which would never be boring – choose something related to the natural world of nature and then you will never be bored at all. It is very rare when a hobby can offer you practically unlimited number of opportunities to develop – but it is exactly this case!

But here is another side of the story, the sad side. And this side is playing critical role in our ideology.

Humanity is a game changer to our planet and this is why the nature we know is disappearing so quickly. Climate change, extensive chemical and waste pollution, altering or destroying of natural habitats, spreading of diseases or invasive species – all of these factors are bringing thousands of species on the brink of extinction and many of them disappeared from the face of the Earth already. Today we have no undisturbed habitats on our planet and even previously less affected locations are exposed to danger of imminent destruction.

Sub-adult Velvet Beauty female
Velvet Beauty (Peruphasma schultei), magnificent species with distribution range of just several square kilometers, is safe now – it is widely spread through the collections around the world.

All of us know animals like Tigers, Elephants or Gorillas and we can see clearly that many organisations are making all possible efforts to save them, but there are more than 26 000 of other species (International Union of Conversation of Nature assessment and this is still only a rough figure) which have much less public attention. Most of them are completely unknown to people and very small (sometimes – tiny), unpresentable and/or considered as notorious (for example – Cockroaches), but they are crucial for our planet ecosystem.

Every ecosystem is like a house of cards – just start to remove cards and it’s stability would be decreased and it will fall down when you’ll remove enough of them. The core of the situation is that we are the part of this ecosystem too and with every extinction are closer and closer to our own end – we have no spare Earth to live on.

Our opinion is that in the current situation, when humanity displays such an irresponsible attitude towards the nature, one of the most effective ways to save wild species is to keep and breed them under captivity conditions. This way we can learn the most about every specie and isolate it from all negative factors of their natural habitats (or what’s left from them).

In case our global society will realise one day what humanity does to the world and (if it would be not too late for us) will start to restore the nature, we will have flora and fauna to release new habitats to. And then maybe we all will have a chance to survive and to learn from our own mistakes.

The situation of course is much more complicated than described above and if you are interested – you can learn more about it from different sources (like https://www.iucn.org/ or https://www.iucnredlist.org).

Thanks to modern knowledge and technologies we can bring and maintain a piece of tropical rainforest or hot African desert to our homes. And observe thousands of wild species in captivity which is an unbelievable experience for people of any age – most of us have no idea how incredibly diverse and beautiful our planet’s nature can be and it is definitely a huge opportunity to learn about the world around us.

This is the corner stone for everything  we are doing now and what we are planning to do in the future.

We would be more than happy to receive from you any questions, feedbacks or suggestions. Feel free to use our FaceBook page to share your thoughts with us!

Ivan & Oksana

Small Exotic Farm

Freemount

Charleville

Co. Cork
Ireland