We’re mammals, they’re not. There’s an awful lot of space between us. To be able to make contact across the space feels rather special.
I had my little painted turtle for 18 years, my iguana for 17. They had enough time to learn a lot.
All it takes is love and patience: those two can accomplish much.
It’s easy to understand why anyone would love a cat, a dog, or a bunny. They’re cuddly, they can love us back, they can be trained to perform useful work, and can even play with us.
But I love lizards and turtles, too. I’ve had many different kinds as pets. You can’t teach them to do jobs, I’ve never known a lizard to play, it’s hard to be cuddly when you don’t have any fur, and as for loving us back–well, I’ve had a few lizards and turtles who did a pretty good imitation of it, and maybe it wasn’t an imitation after all.
Dogs and cats, rats and bunnies, goats and horses–they’re mammals, like we are. That means we have a lot in common. We can get into each other’s heads, as it were. You can understand what your cat wants, even though she can’t tell you in words. Your dog can understand what you want, etc.
But what about a lizard or a turtle? (Those of you who are wondering why I’ve left out snakes–well, I’ve had no experience with snakes.) These are very, very different from mammals. No parental care: the eggs hatch and off they go.
But I’m here to tell you that you can win the trust of a lizard or a turtle. They will lose their fear of you, certainly seem to enjoy it when you handle them; and if they’re big and smart enough to be allowed the run of the house, they’ll often seek you out, and seem to be happy in your company. And if treated kindly and gently, they can learn to do things that they’d never ordinarily even think of doing! You should have seen my iguana cuddled up with his doggy and catty friends. Unthinkable, really. But he’d been around long enough, and thoroughly hand-raised from the time he was a tiny little green thing, to be able to adapt to many unusual situations.
To me a bond with a reptile feels special because I know how different they are, I know what a great gaping space a turtle and I have to bridge before the turtle wants me to tickle the top of his head and the underside of his neck. A turtle in the wild who allowed anything like that would have to be totally crazy. To have the little slowworms (legless lizards: charming little souls) scooting over to me to get fed and petted–well, really, that made me feel like something very fine was happening to them and me. It felt like a glimpse into God’s restoration of Creation.
When I had an art class to teach, I used to take my iguana to school because the kids liked to draw him, and feed him wild strawberries. He behaved himself all day, with perfect manners. He had a bond of trust with me that he extended to most other humans. He and Patty hit it off from the git-go. He and Patty’s dog were instant friends.
Reptiles are capable of much more than we expect from them; and to have had a role in bringing it out–well, what can I say? I love it when that happens!
This one is tame–I think.
Those scary stories about alligators living in our city sewers turned out to be an urban legend. But here’s something almost as bad that’s definitely not a legend.
Wild colonies of South American tegu lizards have established themselves in Florida and are doing well enough to threaten to “march across the South” as far as the Carolinas and Texas, wildlife experts say (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-lizards/invasion-of-big-voracious-lizards-threatens-u-s-south-study-idUSKBN1KO1AF).
How did that happen? People acquire the tegus as pets, get tired of them, and let them go.
Tegus are heavy, muscular lizards with big heads and strong jaws, and they can grow to be four feet long. In Florida they’re eating alligator and bird eggs, any small animals they can catch, and fruit. As tegu owners already know, tegus are not picky eaters. They’ll scarf down practically anything; and getting bitten by a large tegu would feet like getting your hand caught in a car door. Trust me, I know. My savannah monitor (you could easily mistake it for a tegu) nailed me once, and you should’ve heard me howl. And that was just a warning bite, as in “No more medicine, you putz!” If she’d meant business, it would’ve gone hard with me.
There’s nothing wrong, I’d say, with having a tegu for a pet; but it’s very wrong to release one into the wild. Can’t we be decent to our animals? Acquiring a pet of any kind ought to be a loving commitment for as long as the animal lives.
I had to part with my monitor. I had to medicate her, the treatment was successful, but she hated it and it left her with a deep grudge against me. Eventually I found a man, affiliated with the Staten Island Zoo, who had remodeled his home to house his collection of really cool reptiles, and he was happy to adopt Spot. If a monitor lizard could purr, she would have purred when I handed her over to her new owner. Made me feel about two inches tall, but I’m sure I did the right thing.
If you’re not going to keep and love your pet, you shouldn’t have it in the first place.
Meanwhile, the tegus are coming, the tegus are coming…
Phoebe, you asked for it, so here you go: a baby fence lizard. That’s somebody’s knuckle he’s resting on. They grow up to be about six inches long, but they’re already perfectly formed when hatched–albeit only an inch long or so.
I had some of these guys in an aquarium, and one day, out of the blue, Patty cried, “Look! She’s laying eggs!” The biggest female was indeed laying eggs, about two dozen of them. A quick phone call to the reptile house at the Staten Island Zoo gave me the information I needed to take care of the eggs–put ’em in a cookie tin full of sphagnum moss, don’t let it get too damp, and keep it in a quiet, dark place until they hatched. And by Jove, every last one of them hatched, giving me two dozen tiny lizards that looked exactly like adults.
These are among the very few lizards native to New Jersey, which meant I didn’t have to meet any exotic dietary requirements for them or worry too much about temperature variations in my apartment. It was also the only time I ever had any lizard eggs that actually hatched. My European wall lizards laid eggs, but I never knew about it until the eggs had all dried out from being buried in gravel. Someone shoulda told me!