$64,000 question. I think there should be no selling of animals at expos IF there is substance behind all the claims that collections are at risk. There are enough avenues currently available for the buying of animals do we need a 1 day selling marathon which gives everyone an opportunity to move on their sick animals to the unsuspecting public?
I have not bought an animal at an expo in the last 20 odd years but when I come back from an expo the first place I go is in the shower and clean clothes. I don't know if the risks are real Sdaji but I will say they do have me worried.
I'm only playing devil's advocate. I know expos aren't going away, neither is selling at expos.
I've never bought an animal from an expo, and I've almost always been extremely selective about where I source things, and if I've really wanted something from a source I wasn't sure about I've quarantined properly. But amusingly, people simultaneously bang on about the risks of viruses and advocate pet shops and expos and themselves actively trade and carry out activities as I described above.
I also wash clothes and shower and go through an elaborate decontamination process after coming into contact with any reptiles/collection/pet shop/expo even if I don't touch any animals, which I almost always don't. Ask anyone who has come back with me from anything to do with reptiles what it's like! Haha! I force them to do it too or they're not allowed inside, and even if they do it all, they won't be allowed near my animals for some time afterwards.
It always amused me, and sometimes made me a little pissed off, when buyers would come to the house, I'd recognise them from the forums and they'd have been talking about quarantine, they'd want to buy stuff, and I wouldn't let them touch anything until they'd bought it. Even after telling me stuff like "I figured while buying a couple of snakes we'd make a full reptile day of it so we visited a couple of pet shops on the way here" they couldn't understand why they weren't allowed inside the house, let alone given the full tour to see and handle everything! Even though I always kept a clean collection, I'd shower and wear fresh clothes immediately before leaving the house if I was going to go to any other keeper's home, though no one else seemed to pay the same courtesy, which is part of why I could count the number of people who I'd be happy to openly show the collection to on my thumbs.
Very very few people practise any form of effective quarantine in Australia, and it's not much different in the USA (I'm actually not 100% sure about Europe). In Asia they don't even really pay attention or talk about the concept of quarantine, but while individual collections seem to vary (which doesn't seem to correlate with quarantine, moreso management and general husbandry methods/standards), the overall picture in terms of diseases prevalence wherever you go, which is very limited. The USA 'should' be a crazy pile of diseases if what we are told by the vets was remotely true, everything in Asia should be diseased, but the reality is clearly different. Getting a grasp on the realities is difficult because almost no one, least of all the vets, wants to be honest or realistic about it, and few even have the knowledge and understanding to grasp the concepts anyway. In reality, almost always, you can go to an expo or one of the notorious markets where countless reptiles are routinely brought in from all over the world and kept long term in the same place with zero attempt at quarantine, and buy whatever you want, and you can be pretty confident it'll be healthy (and if it isn't it's almost always because of poor husbandry or transportation stress). I personally have never done such a thing and literally would have a phobia level freak out about buying from such a place, but I know many people who have and there aren't problems. Many of those shops also have resident animals either as mascots or breeders, which constantly get exposed to animals from all imaginable sources, for years on end, and as long as the husbandry is good, they invariably stay healthy.
Whatever happened to IBD and OPMV anyway?
