Childhood Hobby Grows Into Mobile Zoo : Naturalist: A fascination with animals has led Dean Davis to amass some unusual pets. Now, the self-taught zoologist takes them on the road and shares them with others.

When he was 8, Dean Davis bought a tiny green turtle for a quarter, put it in a pan with a plastic palm tree, and fed it dried flies. He flushed it down the toilet when it died.

He got another. But he went to the library to learn how to keep it.

Thirty-four years later, the cooter is thriving. So is the crocodile Davis bought at Woolworth’s when he was 12, an alligator snapper he got when he was 8, and hundreds of other beasts he has acquired over the years.

Davis, 42, is one of those rare individuals who manage to turn a boyhood hobby into a career.

The self-taught naturalist--an outspoken man who is given to jibes at animal-rights activists and his ex-wife--spends his days giving ecology talks at schools, civic meetings and museums and his nights tending to about 300 species of creatures.

His menagerie includes foot-long scorpions, tarantulas, whistling marmots, monkeys, macaws, sloths, rattlesnakes, chinchillas, prairie dogs, kinkajous, coatimundis, land crabs, cobras, pythons, tree frogs, sail-finned basilisk lizards, barking geckos, and a nine-pound, rat-eating Amazon toad.

Many are cast-offs from zoos, pet shops or people who found an exotic novelty too hard to handle. Some were acquired through swaps arranged over computer bulletin boards linking zoo traders.

“I’ll give a home to any animal people don’t want,” Davis said.

He tried to open his collection to the public as a zoo eight years ago. But he dropped the plan after harassment from animal-rights activists.

“There are some groups who feel animals are better off dead than in a cage,” said Davis, who is secretive about the location of his animals for fear of a break-in.

Since he can’t bring people to see his animals, Davis brings his animals to the people. He’s booked about 275 days a year, he says, mainly in schools but also at museums such as the Museum of Natural History in New York City.

“This is the zoo-mobile,” he said while chain-smoking cigarettes and swigging caffeine-packed Jolt cola beside his Buick Skylark during a break between shows at Glenmont Elementary School, just south of Albany. The car, littered with corncobs and Cheerios, has only a driver’s seat so that it has room for cages and foam reptile boxes.

At Glenmont, children wearing wildlife T-shirts greet him by his first name; Davis has been doing programs there twice a year for four years, he says. Teachers plan science and writing projects around the shows.

Davis’ 40-minute talks are fast-paced, funny and filled with facts. One show at Glenmont, on camouflage, included moths that mimic leaves, and a baby crocodile with bands that blend in with cattails.

“This guy’s caterpillar is the coolest mimic,” he said, holding up a butterfly. “It looks like bird doo-doo. It works so well that there are 20,000 kinds of butterflies with bird-dropping caterpillars.”

“This is one of the deadliest snakes in the world,” he said, draping a banded krait across his bare hands. “His fangs are thinner than an eyelash. He’d only bite me if I stepped on him or hurt him, because it would probably break his teeth. Nature gave him warning colors: black and yellow stripes.”

Davis was a guest lecturer at the New York State Museum in Albany for five years, until his contract was dropped last fall.

“I wasn’t politically correct,” Davis said. “Some people say I sound like Rush Limbaugh when I talk about animal rights. One line that got me in trouble was one I stole from Rush: If dolphins are smarter than people, how come we catch them in tuna nets?”

Although he has been collecting animals since childhood, Davis discourages others from doing so unless they can meet an animal’s needs.

“Reptiles, especially turtles, take a long time to die,” Davis said. “A kid might have one live for two years and think that’s great. But that animal should have lived 45 years. It just died a slow death.”

“This cooter eats a pound of water plants a day, plus worms, goldfish, dead mice,” Davis said, referring to his 34-year-old dime-store turtle. “People starve them. They don’t keep them warm enough. They don’t provide ultraviolet light for basking.”

When someone gives him a new animal, Davis said, he seeks a mate for it.

“The only way you can tell if an animal is really healthy is if it reproduces,” he said.

“I’ve had some Mexican two-footed worm lizards for 20 years. I’ve never gotten them to breed. I don’t know if they’re too hot, too cold, if it’s some dietary deficiency. . . . That drives me berserk.”

“With my two-toed sloths, vitamin E and selenium got them to breed like rats,” he said.

He uses the young in shows, and gives some to zoos. Many become food.

“My 17-foot cobra will swallow a six-foot python like a piece of spaghetti,” Davis said. “The baby turtles I use as food for cottonmouths and anacondas.”

His vocation has hazards. He has been bitten in the knee and the head by his 12-foot crocodile. A nine-foot monitor lizard cracked three of his ribs with her tail.

“I’ve been bitten by poisonous snakes 43 times,” he said. A year ago, he lost a finger to gangrene resulting from a bite inflicted when a boy hassled a cottonmouth he was handling at a school.

But Davis takes the pain in stride, with a hint of pride:

“That cottonmouth was the great-grandchild of the first venomous snake that ever bit me, back when I was 12,” he said.