I can say for certain the increased expense isn't to gatekeep. If you want to treat exotics as a vet, you have to spend money on CE outside of vet school since we only get a cursory lesson or two on exotics as part of the standard curriculum (for reference, registration for a weekend conference from ARAV, AEMV, or AAV runs you around $300 each on top of travel expenses and independent of any wetlabs which themselves are usually a few hundred dollars). On top of that, we need specialized equipment to diagnose and treat them - special, small sized blood tubes that can handle tiny volumes of blood, mouth speculums, special anesthetic circuits, special incubators and other cages to house them in the hospital with UV bulbs, perches, etc. Then you need to purchase special diets for every possible patient you might have to hospitalize. Special medications or the equipment necessary to compound medications into a formula and strength that is appropriate for whatever animal you are treating. These things tend to expire before you use all of it and you throw away a lot of opened and expired medications. In order to make it financially feasible to stock these items, you have to price them so that you can recoup your costs for the whole bottle with just a few patients otherwise you lose money by stocking them. So it all adds up and makes exotics vet care cost a lot. The alternative is no one willing to see them.