Does anyone here love reptiles and/or have reptile pets? I have MANY pets, and many of them are reptiles. I get a lot of flak for this from people who are either afraid of reptiles (understandable) or who feel reptiles are evil creatures that should be exterminated. (seriously- these people frighten me) I would love to discuss with other people their own reptile experiences, good or bad, and any theories about why many people fear and loathe my scaly friends.
Long-time snake owner, here. I currently care for a 4 ft. Ball Python, though in the past I’ve had Boas, Reticulated Pythons and a Burmese. The Ball Python is less temperamental than other constricters I have handled. My neices and nephews actualy dig the little guy.
Having two cats makes it hard to have other 4-legged creatures around the house, but over the years I’ve had a few. I raised an Iguana from infancy to about 4 feet in length before it mysteriously went off to that great vegitable patch in the sky. After highschool, I worked part-time in a pet store. I had access to critters that most don’t get a chance to see. Over the years, I’ve raised Savannah and Nile Monitors, various Chameleons and once a Caymon Crocidile (never again. nasty son of a bitch)
I think there are very obvious reasons why people don’t like snakes. Biblical stigmas, the fact that they move in ways that seem unnatural to us, the cold lifeless look in their eyes and the reputation they have for being deadly all factor in our unreasonable fear of snakes. (poisonous snakes make up only 10% of the total snake population and you’ld be hard pressed to find a constrictor large enough to kill a man. Unless you live in an area that dangerous snakes are a common ocurrence,i.e. Australia, certain parts of South America, South Central Asia, there isn’t much to worry about.)
Anyway, it’s good to see a fellow herp fan on the boards.
I like reptiles, but I don’t own any (no pets allowed in my apartment complex, and anyway, my roommate would NOT be happy). I had turtles and an anole for a while as a kid, though, and I used to date a guy who had a couple of iguanas, which was neat. What really surprised me was that they had different personalities, the same way dogs and cats do.
Snakes are also cool. There’s just something incredibly sexy about the way they move, and their patterns are gorgeous.
Well, well, I seem to have found my thread!
Right now all I have is two common garters and a northwestern and an alligator lizard. I have had iguanas, anoles, a tokay gecko (bit like a little meatgrinder, more on this in a bit), house gecko,and a rainbow skink. I have also had a rough green snake. I have had several red eared sliders too.
I work at a small zoo in this area, and while I am mostly in the mammal room, I see quite a bit of the reptiles too. We have an alligator and a caiman, nile and savanah monitors, and two large iguanas, besides a large number of smaller lizards. Our snakes include boas, pythons, mangrove snakes, kings, corns, milksnakes, hognoses, and rattlesnakes, We also have a copperhead. We breed snakes as well. We have the biggest alligator snapping turtle in Canada, common snappers, sliders, box turtles, spurthighed tortises, an afghan tortise, and softshelled turtles. I also look after our frogs and toads, tarantulas (and one of my own) scorpians and insects.
Now for the tokay story.
We used to live in a house that had two suites upstairs. I had my gecko, Worf (big, ugly, mean and a kling-on!) in a sixty gallon tank, set up just by the connecting door. One day I needed to take him out, so I reached in to grab him. Well, he grabbed me first, by the thumb! Man, those little miseries can bite! I had my head pretty well in the tank, which was on a fairly high stand, and the edge of the wire lid was across my neck. Of course our cats just had to see what all the fuss was about, so one of them jumped on the tank top, which pushed the rough wire edge right into my neck, effectively pinning me. The other cat then decided to join the fun. No, he didn’t jump up too. He decided he’d rather climb. Unfortunately, the only thing around was my leg! So, here I am, a gecko hanging off my thumb, a cat hanging off my leg, head first in the tank and screaming like a banshee! The connecting door opens, and our neighbor, Doug, pokes his head in. He takes one look, says “Oh, it’s only you. I thought someone was being murdered!” and closes the door! I finally got all the critters pried off by myself, but boy was I ticked at Doug! Ah, well, the joys of pet ownership!
I still have a large number of pets. Besides the reps, I raise fancy mice, field mice, and I have a deermouse. I have a wild rat and a domestic one too. I’ve got rabbits, a ferret, budgies, a hedgehog, stickbugs, a giant cockroach-well, the list is always changing. Usually, its growing!
As you can see, I’ve really earned my name!
Back when I was a poor college student attending UC Berzerkeley, a couple friends and I visited a reptile shop. They had, for sale, three rough-necked monitors, going for roughly $1,500 each. A few weeks later, we returned, and they were still selling them…for $1,000 for the lot, including the cage (a rather large one, at that)! Had I not been a poor college student, I would have most definitely bought them.
When I get my own place, I would love to be able to pick up a monitor or two.
As for why people fear reptiles, I’d say it’s because they’re different from us. They aren’t cute and furry, and they come in all sorts of weird shapes and sizes. And their dinosaurian relatives used to eat our mammalian relatives (of course, today’s archosaurs still eat our relatives), so they may be a grudge thing going on.
I think that snakes and spiders really need to get a better PR firm behind them. When you look at what they eat (rodents and insects that can make our lives miserable), and then compare that to the extremely low percentage of them that are poisonous or hostile, they really come out as very beneficial to humans. Instead, they’re squashed, poisoned and summarily executed on a routine basis. This is bogus and needs to be remedied. Sadly, ignorance will continue to rule in this department of dubious villification.
Zenster (who has owned a 6’ boa, lizards and snakes for most of his life)
I love animals of all kinds, and just got into reptiles. I had anoles before that I caught at my aunt’s house in Mississippi but sent them back with her when I started to feel sorry for them in their little cage. Now I have a turtle [sub] shhh…he’s not supposed to be in the dorm[/sub] named Ichabod. After he had an abcess on his face and I couldn’t find a vet for him (don’t worry, he’s OK now), I decided that I might specialize in exotics when I finally do get to be a vet. I’d like more turtles and an iguana someday, and maybe some snakes but I don’t think I could feed them rodents so they’d have to be small.
I have a swhack of pets…
Right now the only reptile is a very beguiling Leopard Gecko name Ludwig von Geckovin.
I used to have a Cuban Knight Anole named Fidel Castro, but he died. 
I also used to have an albino Pac-Man Frog - he was bright banana yellow and orange orange, so of course he was named Herb, a la Herb Tarlic. Sadly, he died too. (He was about 10 years old.)
Previous to that I had a Red Eared Slider (turtle) named Rico Suave - he lived to be about 15 yrs.
Currently, apart from Ludwig, I also have 2 bunnies (Bart & Benny), a parakeet (Sammy), a breeding pair of sevrums (Ralph and Fredia) along with a bunch of other as yet unnamed fish, including 2 10" pl*cos.
Right now that’s it. 
Hey bee, can I recommend garter snakes? Not only do they have the advantage of being free for the taking in any field, some of them are really pretty. One of our local types has a black background with three bright yellow stripes and a double row of reddish orange dots down their sides. The best things about garters,( besides the price !), is their small size and the fact that they will live quite happily on dewworms or goldfish. The more northern species don’t need high tempertures either and can be kept in a tank without a hotrock, although they do better with one, as the direct heat helps them digest their food. They don’t need a heatlamp, though and in fact do better if kept on the cool side. They like a water dish big enough to curl up in, and one big enough to swim would be much appreciated. I keep mine in a tank with branches and some of them seem to like climbing, which surprised me since they’re a grass snake. If you’re going to hunt your own, look for a combination of long grass and water. They like blackberry bushes too. They can be surpisingly urban.
One of my best spots is beside a very busy major street.
Good Luck!
Zenster, hi! How’s the pup?
zoogirl, you continue to impress me. Singlehandedly, you maintain a substantial genetic ark on your own dime. This alone deserves more praise than I have time for or this board has room to fit. So I’ll just say that the mutt is doing extremely well (he got some thumps for whizzing in the basement today) and I simply adore the depth of reporting you provide about garter snakes.
Please detail exactly how you are supposed to feed a garter snake goldfish. I was unaware (stop the presses!) that a land snake might fish. What do you do? Lob the flipping about and gasping piscine treat into the terrarium and hope the herp doesn’t request a squeeze of lemon or do you have to have an amphibious environment in order to provide them sushi-on-the-hoof? Speaking of which, it is now time for me to dive on my parcel of sushi I bought for din-dins this evening.
Enquiring minds want to know.
Zenster, thanks. Glad to hear the pup is well enough to get into trouble! He must be on the mend!
About the sushi a la herp, as I said garters love water and ought to have a dish at least big enough to get into. I just put the fish in the dish. One of the tanks we had at the zoo had a glass partition so that one end held water and the rest was done like a streambank. The water part had a pump and filter and the fish lived in there quite well, until the snake decided it was dinnertime!
I’ve had turtles as long as I can remember. I have also had a ball python for the last 7 or 8 years. I would like to think that I have split custody of a banded king snake that my ex-boyfriend and I had. Reptiles are cool pets, but nothing beats my puppy dog.
Thanks for the info, zoogirl. That will be something to consider when I get my own place where animals that breathe air aren’t against the rules, and I can finally have as many animals as my budget will allow. I know I can handle the fish-feeding. Ichy (who is a Southern Painted Turtle, complete with racing stripe, BTW) gets guppies as treats every once in awhile.
Auuuughhhh!
This is one of the top secret designs I have for my Tank of the Future ®. It too would have both water and soil sections. So, what you’re telling me is that if I include a garter snake in the terrarium portion, I will have an even more frequent opportunity to exchange fish specimens in the aquatic sector. Sounds like fun.
i’ve always liked reptiles, epesailly froags, lizards and turtles. it all started back in elementary when i was litterally horse crazy and dog crazy, but my parents wouldn’t let me keep anything as big as a dog (even though i could have hamsters and birds). i’ve become used to only having small pets and since then, and it brought me closer to reptiles.
We’ve got a blue tongue lizard living downstairs. He gave me one hell of a shock yesterday emerging from the parsley in the garden. It’s prime snake season here and the front end of a blue tongue looks incredibly like a snake when you don’t expect to see it.
He’s hung around for two days now. Found him downstairs eating from the cats’s leftovers and then he cruised the garden eating snails. Primafloret the Elder has decided he is an incredibly gifted blue tongue but I’m not sure on what grounds.
Hey, PrimaFlora, is he a fairly large lizard, kind of light brown? Looks like a small monitor, but with legs that are more like a skink’s? (Very small for the size of the lizard.) We have a blue-tongued at work. I would imagine it’s the same. He’s one of our better tempered animals, very laid back. If he’s taking out the snails, you should encourage him to stay awhile!
I love reptiles ( and amphibians ). Herpetolgy was definitely my “pet field” in college, though I really was more a generalist then anything else. But as a vertebrate physiology professor of mine once said with amused exasperation - “Once a snake-chaser, always a snake-chaser” 
.
At my height I had 13 snakes, several lizards, a salamander or two, and a couple of frogs. No turtles, though ( too much hassle ). Have my share of stories, including the “How I got bit in the eyeball by a snake” story ( shocking just how vascularized the eyelid is ) and the de rigeur “the broken freezer full of rotting mice” story ( everyone has one of those - but mine is particularly repulsive 
).
The roomie, back when he was a teenager ( he’s 50 now ), had ( along with his older brother ) probably one of the largest collections of exotic herps in southern Caliornia, including such charming pets as White-Lipped Cobras and Puff Adders. This was back before the government started ( quite rightly ) cracking down on such things. They basically got all of their animals for free from the sleazy local dealers, who willingly unloaded their sick and injured imports ( all wild-caught back then ) onto these two kids, who’d then attempt to nurse them back to health.
At any rate, I’m no longer a “pet person” in that sense, anymore. Just have an aging cat now. But I still love finding them while outdoors.
I’d just like too add a couple of caveats to Zoogirl’s comments about Garter Snakes. They are good pets, but they have a couple of minor drawbacks folks should be aware of.
Mostly, they stink 
. First off, when they’re still a little wild ( or if you get the rare individual that doesn’t ever acclimate to being handled ) they will smear a discharge from their anal glands on you, that is both persistent and heady. Doesn’t particularly bother me, even brings back fond memories, but then I’m one of those freaks that actually likes the odor of skunks ( from a distance ). Most people I know, can’t stand pissed-off Garter Snake stink.
Second, there is a trade-off involved with keeping fish-eating snakes. It is neat to watch, and easy to acquire and deliver the “food”. But the excreta tends to be rather more watery and odoriferous compared to that of mouse-eating snakes. It can get smeared all over the place very quickly. And because piscivores eat more frequent, smaller meals than the mice-eaters, the net result is you have to clean up after them a lot more often. If that doesn’t bother you, then no problemo .
A word about collecting pets. In general it doesn’t bother me ( not that anyone asked for my permission ) and I’ve done it myself. But you should get a good field guide, check state and federal regulations ( for instance in CA you need a CA fishing license ), and be very aware of what you are collecting. Some critters should not be touched. It is both illegal and ethically wrong to mess with a number of threatened critters like San Francisco Garter Snakes and California Mountain Kingsnakes ( if the latter isn’t illegal to touch, it should be - I know for a fact the former is ). Find out what is both dirt common and would make a decent pet before collecting it. And set up a proper habitat in advance. For instance there are three or four species of Garter Snakes ( Thamnophis sirtalis, T. elegans and/or T. atratus, and T. couchii ) in the Ca Bay Area and five or more subspecies. Of those subspecies, two are threatened/endangered and quite illegal to harass, one is less common but not particularly threatened, and two are common as dirt, including the gorgeous California Red-sided Garter Snake ( Thamnophis sirtalis infernalis ).
In general, I advocate buying captive-bred animals from a reputable breeder. Many of the Rat Snakes ( including the Corn Snake ) and Kingsnakes make fine pets .
Zenster and Bay Area folk in general: There are number of good places to see this phenomena - But if you are in the UC Botanical Gardens in the Berkely Hills on a warm spring day and the little Japanese pond back behind the succulent section is in commision, you might try sitting down there for a bit. If you’re lucky you might see Pacific Coast Aquatic Garter Snakes ( Thamnophis atratus ) come down to the pond to hunt. Nothing quite as primal as watching a little snake head rise up out of the duckweed, with a flopping minnow in its mouth .
- Tamerlane
Wow, I never thst this many herpers would be here. Alright. I myself have only 2 reptile, a leopard gecko and a White’s Tree Frog. Thats all I can afford to take on. Money is hard to come by at 14. And so is space. But, I do enjoy my good friends snake collection, which 6 as we speak.
Used to have a Rock Python. He was a gorgeous snake. He was a year or so old and got to about 5ft.I have no idea why he died. He ate very well and was real active.
He could sure be a mean SOB though.