‘You’ve got to be a little hard-hearted sometimes because God doesn’t want reptiles to eat cabbage.’

Have you ever thrust your hand into a barrel of squirming baby rats and then fed one to a snake? Have you fed a live fig beetle to a Northern Madagascar crested chameleon and listened to the crunching sound it makes? Bob Brock performs these--and many other skin-crawling tasks--every day. The 41-year-old Brock has been a reptile keeper at the San Diego Zoo for 16 years. The zoo’s snake house contains more than 600 reptiles, and Brock is responsible for the daily care and feeding of as many as 150 snakes, geckos, lizards and chameleons. He is quite at home as he walks through the stuffy house--cautioning visitors not to lean against cages and ticking off statistics about the many endangered species. Brock, who delights in telling the story of a man who had his nose bitten off by a tree crocodile, hasn’t himself had a case of the willies yet. Being careful not to lean against any cages or inspect the tree crocs too closely, Times staff writer Caroline Lemke interviewed Brock, and Don Bartletti photographed him.

You’ve got to be a little hard-hearted sometimes because God doesn’t want reptiles to eat cabbage. And they don’t. They’ve got to eat things . But, if you had some choice, if you were going to be fed to a snake or an animal, is it nicer to be thrown on the ground and killed instantly, or would you rather be devoured alive? It’s a grim choice, but we don’t feed things alive to the snakes except as an absolute last resort. It’s just too cruel.

There are six keepers in this department, and we have a lot of experience between us. We’re not trying to sound like know-it-alls, because we aren’t. I haven’t read every journal. My tiny area of expertise isn’t how the arm structure of the whole world’s chameleons work, or how their eyes work independently. Mine is how to keep them alive.

I venture to say you could give us any reptile on the planet and we could probably keep it alive, and some of them are real tricks. And, unless this reptile was just on death’s door, we can know within hours whether to heat it up, cool it down, put it in acidic water, raise or lower the humidity, whatever it takes.

I do a nose count every day. I make sure everybody looks good. See, that’s supposed to be the difference between being experienced and not--if you can look at a reptile--and reptiles are tough--and be able to say, “I don’t think he’s feeling good”; “I think she’s pregnant”; “I think it’s going to die”; “I think it’s already died”; “I think it’s doing OK.”

I have an obligation. All of these animals in the world are dying out--and they are by the gobs, extinct by the day. We can’t save them all, but we can save a few. It’s part of our business. We save a few. We can’t save everything, but we can do chameleons. We can do some frogs. We can do those Fiji iguanas.

It’s a lot like working in a hospital. You see little kids come in sick and go out well and healthy. But, on the other hand, a bunch of them come in sick and go out in a box. You’re going to see extremes.

I see a lot of death here. Not the animals I kill to feed the other ones, but just the reptiles that come in misused, sick and abused, and ones filled with parasites. Once in a while it gets to me.

I have a couple reptiles I like a lot more than others. But, at the same time, anything where I take extra time for one, I’m depriving the others, and, whether it’s some dumb little lizard from around here that runs in the yard or some exotic thing from Bangladesh, it’s just as entitled to attention, the needs of life. It’s hard to think: “Oh, it’s just an iguana. Who cares?” It’s not. It deserves attention.

I can honestly say I work here because it’s fun, because I could probably do something really dull and make a lot of money. You’re not going to get rich here. Animal keepers are not oil executives. But it’s a good place. There’s no better people, and I can’t just work at a desk. If I just sat at a machine and typed, I can imagine how grim it would be.