[engineerworks]

American, European, Arabs do routinely buy these exotic animals to keep them as pets.

But most of these are used for traditional Chinese medicine.

[microtherion]

Komodo dragons would seem to be very poor choices as pets. Fast, aggressive, not very affectionate, and their bites can cause major septic problems: http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,133163,00.h...

[sumedh]

I dont think rich people want to cuddle a komodo, they just want it to impress their other rich friends.

[bredren]

Seems like a series of really dumb choices leading up to that incident.

[tomhoward]

I can't find any reports of Komodo dragons being used in Chinese medicine.

I can find news reports from 2017 of discoveries that compounds found in Komodo blood could have medical applications as an antibiotic, but I can find no mentions of it having started to be used in Chinese medicine.

Can you point to any evidence for this?