PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman Tackles Your Tough Questions and Tricky Situations

We are traveling this summer and want to fly with our dogs. What does PETA recommend?

Unless your travel companion’s name is Samsonite, they definitely don’t belong in cargo holds. These areas are not always climate-controlled, and many animals have frozen to death or died of heatstroke in them. Others have been suffocated, injured, or lost. And the noise and turbulence are much more terrifying when you’re in “forgotten class” without so much as a pretzel. If your animals are allowed in the cabin with you, a short flight should be fine. If the flight is long or your dogs are too big, please don’t even think about doing this. Drive or leave them in the care of someone you absolutely trust.

Every summer when we go to the beach, my kids get me to buy a hermit crab for them. I don’t really see anything wrong with doing that, but I’m betting you do!

Are you running out of space in your yard … for hermit crab burial plots? As you likely know, most hermit crabs who’ve been taken from their coastal homes and close-knit colonies to be sold die within a few months – far short of their 30-year life expectancy. You probably won’t want to snuggle up with your kids and put on the video of PETA’s investigation into a hermit crab supplier showing that bags full of living and dead crabs and detached claws were dumped into filthy pens, that live crabs were thrown into the trash with dead ones, and that workers cracked open the animals’ shells, exposing their delicate bodies, and forced them into shells coated with paint – which can be toxic.

But surely you can tell them this: It should be obvious, but a plastic box with nothing more than aquarium pebbles and a fake palm tree doesn’t come close to meeting these sensitive individuals’ needs or replicating the life they were forced to leave behind for fleeting human amusement. That type of habitat is only suitable for a pet rock. If hermit crabs don’t have deep, damp sand to molt in, they’ll die. If their modified gills don’t have high humidity levels in order to breathe, they’ll suffocate. Hermit crabs don’t care if they look like doughnuts or team helmets, and those whose shells are made to look that way are often poisoned by the paint. Stay the shell away from tourist traps that exploit these animals.