Should the law restrict what animals can be kept as pets?

I think it would considerably limit the ownership of non native non regular pets though - it is a lot harder to hide something exotic. I mean at the moment in the UK with no regulations concerning ownership of say meerkats plenty of legal if thoughtless businesses will provide people with meerkats and will source them from any old place offering them. If licensing was bought in a lot of places would stop offering them and places providing them would have to be of a much higher standard.

I know it will not stop the suffering completely but it will reduce it considerably. There is a much lower percentage of badly kept venomous snakes than there are of say rat snakes in the UK because you need a licence for a venomous snake which means you have to know what you are doing. Anyone can buy a rat snake which means lots of people don't know what they are doing. I want to combat suffering caused by ignorance - I don't expect it to effect that caused by deliberately malice but just because we cant stop malice does that mean we should ignore ignorance?