Coming Out From Under the Rocks : Pets: From turtles and iguanas to lizards and snakes, reptiles have become the latest rage.
Dogs and cats, move over. Lizards, turtles and snakes are slithering in as the pets of the trendy set.
Reptile fans say their cold-blooded companions are quiet, inexpensive and easy to keep. An iguana, for instance, doesn’t need flea baths or an early morning walk, and no neighbor was ever awakened in the middle of the night by the hiss of a snake.
Catering to the trend is Hermosa Beach’s new Reptile Kingdom, which has for sale more than 1,000 exotic creatures, including albino Burmese pythons, leopard tortoises and Parson’s chameleons.
Among the store’s customers is Slash, guitarist of the rock band Guns N’ Roses, who recently paid $3,000 for a 20-foot, 260-pound green anaconda that feasts on baby pigs, according to store owner Erik Berry.
“They’re sort of a pet whose time has come,” says Berry, who estimates there are about a dozen stores statewide that exclusively deal in reptiles. “People are starting to understand reptiles, to realize they aren’t hideous things. They’re definitely becoming more of a mainstream pet.”
Pet industry experts say reptiles are among the fastest-growing area of their trade, despite the fact that many cities require permits and strictly regulate reptiles’ habitats.
In 1990, reptile owners spent $18.2 million on reptile food, about $8 million more than they did three years before, according to a pet store survey conducted by Pet Supplies Marketing Magazine. They also spent $13.6 million in reptile products in 1990, up from $11.9 million in 1987.
“Every retailer who sells reptiles that I’ve talked to in the last six months has told me that the market is up,” said magazine editor Hugh Bishop. “They can sell fire-bellied toads, salamanders, snakes, iguanas, tarantulas. There’s an interest there that . . . is not going away.”
Although the industry does not keep figures on the number of reptiles kept as pets, herpetoculturists (as reptile breeders describe themselves) estimate there are about 1 million people nationwide who share their homes with scaly or hard-shelled animals. Of them, about 20,000 are serious reptile devotees--people who collect and breed reptiles and subscribe to one or more publications devoted to the subject.
Although local figures were not available, membership in an area herpetology club has skyrocketed in the last few years.
“We have grown by leaps and bounds,” said Sandy Veverka, president of the Southern California Herpetology Assn., which saw its membership nearly quadruple in the last two years to about 150 families. “Kids are growing up now with an appreciation for them rather than a fear of reptiles, and a lot of schools now have them in their science classes.”
Children aren’t the only ones going gaga for lizards and snakes.
Reptile aficionados run the gamut from 4-year-old Lizzy Berry, whose father runs Reptile Kingdom, to 69-year-old Anna Lisiewski, who keeps 20 turtles and one rhinoceros iguana at her Downey home.
They are busy professionals such as investor Pete Priamos of Hermosa Beach, who keeps a Burmese python at his home because he doesn’t have time to feed and care for a cat. And they are die-hard hobbyists like Chuck Elliott, a fire extinguisher serviceman, who has turned over an entire bedroom in his Torrance apartment to a collection of some 50 lizards and snakes.
“They’re interesting,” effused Elliott, 23, a U.S. Army serviceman who was stationed in Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Storm. “They’re prehistoric looking. And some of them have personalities, believe it or not.”
Because many cultures and religions associate snakes and lizards with evil--it was, after all, a snake that persuaded Eve to tempt Adam with an apple--some herpetologists have fashioned psychological theories about the types of people who take creeping, crawling critters as pets.
“There is a big piece of the community . . . they’re like little boys who have snakes or lizards in their pockets and they pull them out to frighten little girls,” said John Wright, curator of the section of herpetology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. “Some of them never grow out of that. Snake people are, generally speaking, snake-in-the-pocket types, still frightening little girls and rebelling against the center of society.”
“Lizard people,” he added, “are similar to snake people, but not as flamboyant. Most of them are good people, they take care of their animals and learn a lot about them.”
Although one reptile club in Chicago dates back to the early 1900s, several current hobbyists tie their passion for reptiles to the surging popularity of dinosaurs, their extinct and ancient cousins, in the last decade or so.
“There were reptiles here before the dinosaurs,” Veverka noted. “They survived when dinosaurs didn’t. To survive this many billions of years in a relatively unchanged state, it just blows me away really. There’s nothing you can be near that has existed that long.”
Children’s programs such as “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and professional wrestler “Jake the Snake” Roberts, who is famed for entering the ring with a boa wrapped around his shoulders, have also added to the reptile rage.
“The volume of tortoise imports has increased probably 100-fold in the last three or four years, almost strictly because of Ninja Turtles,” said Ellin Beltz, a faunal surveyor for the Illinois Department of Conservation and a past membership secretary of the Chicago Herpetological Society, the largest club of its kind in the nation.
The phenomenon has a downside, however. Herpetologists have come across several turtles whose shells have been carved up to make them resemble the cartoon characters, Beltz said. At the same time, the rising demand for turtles has begun to drastically deplete the wild turtle population, she said.
The rising popularity of all reptiles, and the increasing number of amateurs taking them home as pets, has some naturalists worried about the animals’ welfare. But there are also more veterinarians who are willing and able to treat ailing turtles, lizards and snakes.
“Ten years ago, a sick lizard was a dead lizard,” said veterinarian Douglas Mader of the Long Beach Animal Hospital. “Now there are more and more people taking time to learn how to fix them.”
Although dogs and cats still make up the bulk of his practice, Mader said his clinic now treats between 40 and 60 reptiles a day. And their owners are no less devoted to their pets than those who own dogs or cats, he said.
A Texas couple, for instance, flew their four-foot-long monitor lizard, Homer, to Long Beach recently for abdominal surgery after the lizard swallowed a cat toy. The flight and medical treatment cost the couple about $1,500, Mader said.
More common, he said, are improperly fed iguanas and turtles that end up with calcium deficiencies or bladder stones. Other frequent patients include lizards with respiratory problems, a result of not being kept in a warm enough environment.
Although many reptiles are imported into the United States from Australia or Africa, a growing number of them are now bred in captive breeding programs. In 1989, an estimated 1.3 million reptiles were imported into the nation, more than twice the number that were brought in three years before, said Michael Osborn, a wildlife inspector for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Torrance office.
Wildlife experts believe that about one-fifth of the nation’s reptile imports are illegal, Osborn said.
Reptiles prohibited by the California Department of Fish and Game include crocodiles, caimans, alligators, snapping turtles, cobras, coral snakes and most species of pit vipers. The state code allows some native species to be taken from the wild, although in many cases permits are required.
Cities that also require permits for reptiles include Los Angeles, Torrance and Hermosa Beach. Residents of those cities pay between $25 and $52 a year for permission to own an exotic animal.
But the cost of a permit is no deterrent for those whose hearts melt for the cold-blooded creatures.
Veverka, the herpetology club president, is a case in point. She and her husband, Jim, share their three-bedroom home with a menagerie of about 1,200 caged tortoises, snakes and lizards.
They employ a worker five days a week to help feed and clean the reptiles, and they pay about $800 a month in electricity bills to run the tanks, filters and lights their animals need.
The Southeast Los Angeles County city they live in does not limit reptile ownership or require permits, but the Veverkas nevertheless have asked that it not be identified out of fear that squeamish officials might try to restrict their collection.
And while state authorities fined them $500 and confiscated 30 caged rattlesnakes from their home a few years ago, the couple insist their animal collection now meets all state and federal regulations.
“Every time we walk into the house, we look at ourselves and say we’re nuts, and then something else comes along that’s new and different and we say, ‘Oh, we can make a place for it,’ ” Veverka said. “We have to laugh at ourselves, and yet we wouldn’t trade places with anyone else in the world.”
