Making Money a Cold-Blooded Way

Talk about an entrepreneur. Bob Applegate has already cornered the market on what some futurists predict will become the next yuppie craze: pet snakes.

“They’re beautiful, they’re quiet, and they don’t howl at night,” said Applegate as he ran down the list of the low-maintenance advantages of snakes. “You only have to feed them once every two weeks, and they don’t (foul) the neighbor’s garden.”

A full-time firefighter, Applegate spends his free time breeding snakes for fun and profit. So profitable are his products--a Guatemalan milk snake hatchling sells for $200 these days--that he dreams of opening the world’s first snake shopping center. He’s already begun buying the modest homes on his block and renting them to other snake breeders.

“This would be a one-stop shopping center for the herpetological community,” he said.

Snake collectors, other breeders and potential pet owners could go from house to house, picking up a boa constrictor here, an Arizona mountain king snake there.

150 Snakes Produce 700 Eggs a Year

The idea isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. Applegate’s 150 snakes produce about 700 eggs a year. He sells every hatchling within a month after it’s born, many to out-of-state and overseas customers. Because the city of El Cajon permits him to keep snakes, Applegate figures the city council wouldn’t mind a few more in the neighborhood.

“The demand is outrageous,” he said. “Every year just keeps getting better. People fly around the world on buying trips. That’s where I got the idea of turning this block into a snake mart. We could be the shopping mall of herpetology!”

Yuppies would go for it, he’s sure. Shop till they drop.

Applegate’s interest in snakes started when he was 5, growing up in Pacific Beach.

“I was the kind of kid who loved to scare people,” he said. “If something scared someone, I wanted it.”

He spent his boyhood crawling around ditches, looking for snakes and frogs to wave in friends’ faces. “From then on,” he said, “snakes just grew into a hobby.”

Now 43, he spends more time teaching people to respect reptiles. He breeds 20 species, specializing in exotic, rare snakes from North and Central America.

Applegate is one of only six herpetologists in the world to have bred the Gila monster and beaded lizard, two reptiles whose numbers are rapidly dwindling. Most zoos don’t place a priority on reptile breeding, despite the animals’ demise, either because they lack the interest or the money, he said.

He estimates that he has brought 4,000 snakes into the world since he began breeding them in 1977.

Summer Mating Season in Full Swing

This month, the annual snake-hatching season is in full swing. Most snakes lay their “clutch” of about 15 eggs in late spring, after the 40- to 50-day period in which they are gravid (egg-bearing). Females usually lay one or two clutches a year, though Applegate said he can sometimes coax them into laying a third.

After the snake deposits its eggs, Applegate places them in an incubator. They hatch 60 to 75 days later, struggling as long as five days to break the soft shell. By early August, the breeder will have 700 new mouths to feed. He breeds at least 600 mice a month to defray feeding costs. Despite his seriousness about herpetology, Applegate hasn’t completely outgrown his relish for practical jokes. He said he will pop open a can of fake snakes to shock unsuspecting visitors, or “forget” to explain that the lovely cactus garden in his back yard is, in fact, a snake pit. Taking a scientific tack, he explains that, because a male snake has two sex organs, it could mate with two females at the same time.

“Now, being typical females, I don’t think they’d go for that,” he said, smiling.

The breeding snakes live in a posh system of “condo cages” stacked one atop the other inside Applegate’s house in suburban El Cajon. The smaller snakes live in plastic shoe or sweater boxes, while larger mating pairs reside in wooden cages with a “downstairs” drawer accessible through a hole in the upper-level floor.

‘Macho’ Snake Phase

The snakes get three bedrooms. Applegate, who’s divorced, gets one. He quipped that his wife disappeared one day about the same time he started keeping 12-foot pythons and boa constrictors. He calls the era his “macho” snake phase.

Do his dates squirm when they meet his house mates? Not often. Most share his interest. Applegate said that, when he mails his annual price list, he always includes a personal ad about his quest for the perfect woman. The tanned, muscular firefighter said he gets quite a few responses from female snake lovers.

“If she gets one of my price lists, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that she likes snakes,” he said.

People who prefer the company of dogs and cats may consider Applegate eccentric, but his hobby has made his house the first stop on his friends’ itinerary.

“When they have guests come in from out of town, I’m the first thing they want to see,” he said.

After working a four-day shift as fire chief on San Clemente Island, he hurries home to spend almost every spare minute with his snakes. He considers it a second full-time job.

Applegate makes a good living as a firefighter, but he makes more money from his snake breeding--up to $45,000 a year, he said. He sells most baby snakes for $75 to $100 apiece. Others, such as the Applegate albino San Diego gopher snake, the hybrid product of his own breeding program, go for $225 each. He said that baby Gila monsters will sell for $350 a pair when he receives permission from the state Department of Fish and Game to transport them out of California.

‘Hard Work and Drudgery’

“People think what I do is pretty glamorous when they think about the money that can be made. What they don’t see and don’t realize is the great amount of time I spend scrubbing cages, or cleaning glass fronts. Actually, the bulk of what I do is not only unglamorous, it’s plain old hard work and drudgery.”

His drudgery is made a more pleasureable with the help of Erika von Klock, a 21-year-old Palomar College student who keeps her three pet snakes at Applegate’s home. The snake aficionados met through a mutual friend who works at the San Diego Zoo. Now she visits Applegate’s snake preserve three times a week.

Two years ago, von Clock moved to Cardiff from Colorado, where she kept the snakes at her boyfriend’s house. Not surprisingly, her parents refused to let their daughter and her 3 1/2-foot boa constrictor live together under their roof. So she pays the animals’ room and board by cleaning cages and feeding snakes for Applegate.

Being rather fond of her reptiles, von Clock didn’t want to stow them in a jet cargo hold when she flew to California from Colorado. So the petite blonde stuffed her two boa constrictors and one small python down her shirt before boarding the airplane. The stunt worked, though, she said, one curious boa kept trying to pop its head over her collar.

Because von Clock’s snakes are pets, she plays with them often. But Applegate rarely touches any of his 150 breeding snakes.

“This is a working collection, not a handling collection,” he said.

There’s also a bit of the scientist in Applegate. To avoid cross-breeding, he keeps meticulous records on each snake’s genealogy. He records their birth date, shedding, eating and mating schedules. He’s presented papers to herpetological societies across the nation. In September, he will travel to London to talk to herpetologists there about commercial breeding.

Because snake husbandry is a new science, no colleges offer courses in it. Applegate is considered a pioneer in the field and an authority around the world.

Snakes may never become the upscale pet some predict for it, but that won’t hurt Applegate’s business. He’s already got enough buyers to support that snake shopping mall.

Don’t think he won’t do it. When the breeder looks inside the incubator warming the 700 eggs he’s tending at a comfortable 82 degrees, he sees more than a natural wonder.

“There’s a new Mercedes in there, if I wanted one.”