Reptile Fight Club - Ron St Pierre Returns to Debate Outdoor Keeping.

Episode Date: May 20, 2022

In this episode, Justin and Chuck tackle the topic of outdoor keeping with Ron St. Pierre. Who will win? You decide. Reptile Fight Club!Follow Justin Julander @Australian Addiction Reptiles-http://www.australianaddiction.comFollow Chuck Poland  on IG @ChuckNorriswinsFollow MPR Network on:FB: https://www.facebook.com/MoreliaPythonRadioIG: https://www.instagram.com/mpr_network/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtrEaKcyN8KvC3pqaiYc0RQMore ways to support the shows.Swag store: https://teespring.com/stores/mprnetworkPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/moreliapythonradio

Welcome to the MDR Network. All right, welcome to another episode of Reptile Fight Club. I'm your host, Justin Julander. And with me, as always, Mr. Chuck Bolin. What is up? What's up, dude? How's it going? Good. Good.

Friday. Another Friday. Fucking kick-ass guest. I'm happy. We have with us the returning for round two, the man, the myth, the legend, Ron St. Pierre. How you doing, man? Good. Glad to be back, man. Yeah, the legend, Ron St. Pierre. How you doing, man? Good. Glad to be back, man. Yeah, glad to have you back.

Yeah, we've got a fun episode for you today. And Ron is about the best qualified person to debate this topic, so we thought who better to bring on than Ron, and he was gracious enough to come on again. He didn't get too uh too annoyed with us last time i guess so wow man i love this podcast this is cool all right yeah well we're happy to have you back it should be a good discussion so yeah always yeah well i'm i i think the most thing the biggest thing i'm curious about i saw you post a picture of your

spencer's monitor digging yeah update you notice there was no update motherfucker so so about two hours after i posted that photo i went outside and i saw her out of the burrow and flipped around with her head in and i thought oh she's done backfilling she's packing the eggs right yeah there was nothing in there and then and then two days later i started finding eggs in the feces oh no she turned around and ate them and i have one more shot this year well i have one more female that's gravid so i'm hoping maybe but i'm not gonna lie i'm getting discouraged but yeah those eggs may not have even been fertile it's possible that male didn't breed that female yeah yeah and that's i

mean you don't usually typically see a healthy happy monitor eat their own eggs right they're gonna right if they're not good you know correct yeah that's generally been my experience i mean i do know they will eat good eggs sometimes. Some of them will. Usually it's like the male though, right? That gets at the eggs or some or another female or something. Actually, I've seen it in both. Okay. Yeah. Really. I used to see it a lot with tegus. I don't miss those things for that reason. There was a lot of times where a female would lay a huge clutch of eggs and either the female or a male would would

eat them and it was just so aggravating what a what a fun little uh you know genetic dead end well i mean you got to figure though that they they probably you know don't hang out together in the wild you know what i mean like the they do their business and the female goes off and then she finds a spot to for sure yeah and i always tried to separate them when i was sure that the female was going to yeah or as close to laying eggs but sometimes you know you misjudge it and yeah i didn't get the males out quick enough and because i had issues where i was with you know females got really huge and i was sure they were gravid and then I pulled a male and then nothing would happen. So, so over the years I've gotten a little more, um, you know, I'm a little less, uh, I don't, I don't know. I just, I'm slower about moving

them out because, uh, yeah. Don't want to yank that male. I don't want to yank up too early. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, but yeah, I, I have another male Spencer's that I'm raising that is big enough to go was big enough this year, but he wasn't quite, I was, he was a little too small and I was like, I, my thought was, Oh, maybe that big giant female might decide he's more of a snack than a potential mate. But now he's, he's caught up to her now. So going into, I'm going to hibernate them together with that younger male. And I think, uh, I think if I'm having a problem

with these, it's definitely not the females cause they've laid infertile eggs now. Yeah. This will be the second year. It's the male that that i that big giant male that i have is just not doing anything yeah but this little guy i think will get it done so yeah cool i'm i'm rooting for you man those are some cool lizards for sure yeah definitely something i want to get done yeah in case they ban everything at least i can say i did it before they yeah yanked them out from under me oh god let's Let's hope that doesn't happen. Again, I mean, that's a good reminder to be vigilant, you know, keeping up with USARC and some of the proposed legislation and don't sleep on it, you know.

Yeah, it's unbelievable the shit that's coming out. I don't know if you saw the CITES adding 180 species of turtles. And then at the very end of it it there's a little addendum that they're considering uh stopping the trade of anything that can potentially carry a zoonotic disease which is fucking everything yeah the fuck yeah right yeah it's ridiculous so there'd be no international trade which i mean it wouldn't would kind kind of, I don't know. I mean, yeah, go ahead. Sorry. No, no. I think I know what you're going to say. It's, it's like a, I'm having a hard time deciding how my fate will be affected by that because I

really don't do any international sales, but yeah, there's a lot of people that do make their living doing that. And you're going to, plus you can't bring in new shit either. So if that's done, what's here is here. Yeah. And my concern is at what port, what point of the States individually going to look at that and go,

Oh, well, if we were, you know, if we're not letting country to country, maybe we shouldn't be letting state to state. Yeah. And then it just continues.

Shit rolls downhill. So, yeah, I don't know. Yeah. I, you know then it's a huge battle to try to get that reverse so it's easier to fight it on this end than on the other side so let's yeah for sure but you know i i i see things like um radiated tortoises that huge bus that they made over there where they found like 10,000 radiated tortoises in one crappy little building and you know they were half dead

and dying and just not in good shape and I think they rescued I think like several thousand of them died you know and I just think some sometimes they just protect things into extinction, you know? Yeah, for sure. I mean, if they let those out into the pet trade or at least, you know, enough to kind of satiate the want and the desire to have them, then they don't really, you know. I guess it's hard because sometimes they can import all day long and nobody establishes them because they're imports and they don't want to compete with the imports and so they don't do it and then those things stop being imported and then all of a sudden we don't have them anymore and then they become like the Solomon Island skinks you know they they've stopped the import of those for a while and they were a thousand dollars and then all of a sudden start importing them again they're back down to a couple hundred bucks a piece or you know it's just I don't know I don't know the answer to that, but.

Yeah. We, we bought, we set up 13 of those with the fit, with the assumption that at some point they're going to cut them off again. And then, but there, that, that is an animal that's extremely difficult to establish in any kind of numbers. You know, they're, they're kind of antisocial, right? Or do they get along? No, actually we have one huge enclosure in one giant group and they're they're kind of anti-social right they or do they get along no actually we have one huge enclosure in one giant group and they're very protective of each other and oh gotcha they protect the area it's it's they're pretty cool but nice but they have one baby so

yeah yeah you know the the shingle back skiing problem is like as i think because yeah i love shingle backs i'd love to get some i got offered a pair for 20 grand i'm like yeah if i had 20 grand i don't have 20 grand to spare spend on a pair of lizards that has one baby you know every every other year or something that's that's a little too too much for that kind of project yeah that's uh if you're gonna breed that for something that's a that's a that's like all things considered that's a really steep price're going to breed that for something, that's a, that's a, that's like all things considered, that's a really steep price. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, for sure.

Again, I think, I think I'm, if, you know, if I had that kind of just sitting around and I could spend, I, I, that would probably be something I would want to spend that money on, you know, just so cool. I wouldn't mind having them. Um, you know, just so cool. I wouldn't mind having them. Um, you know, it's, it's kind of a, I mean, well, if you had the business capital out of AAR to do that. Yeah, sure. But, but like, I mean, that's, you know, that's a lot of money. That's a lot of money, man. That's, you know, there's a lot of things I probably need to do, you know, with 20 grand before I buy a pair of shingle backs, but you know, there's a lot of things I probably need to do, you know, with 20 grand before I buy a pair of shingles backs, but you know, that's a species I'd love to work with

someday and, you know, hope to someday. So, yeah, me too. I mean, I've had them in the past years ago, you know, in the nineties when they were relatively common and that's so great. Yeah. They were, they were around 700 bucks a piece or something. But you know, I didn't, I never worked with them seriously because of the one baby thing. I was like, well, I couldn't afford to – back then $700 to me was a shit ton of money. And I couldn't afford to have a couple of grand sitting on something that doesn't really pay for itself. It may not even pair up or even like pair up or, you know, be a viable pair or something. Yeah. I mean, there's, yeah, exactly.

Yeah. I don't like buying anything unless I can get 10 of something. And that way I'm sure that I'm getting males and females and have a reasonable chance that a few of them are going to produce them. Yeah. You know, stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah.

And isn't that funny that, that that that 700 a pair you probably could have got 10 for seven grand which is less than it cost to get one today you know i guess the good good part of that is the the person that offered me the pair is doing very well with them and producing numbers of them which is really yeah so um that's that's, that's good. Somebody's doing well with them, but yeah. So, and then, you know, I guess that's in relative terms. I mean, he's not pumping out 50 a year and he's not enough to bring down the price or anything, but you know, enough to keep them going and produce some captive bred offspring, but he had unrelated pairs for sale and things like that so really well that's cool that's promising yeah i'm hoping he continues that and continues to grow them you know

he's he's selling other things in favor of just producing shingle backs you know to to some extent he still has other projects but yeah so there's always somebody out there that's got you know sitting on a big collection of something or other that, you know, they just aren't in the, they don't, they don't get online. They don't just do their thing. There's a lot of guys out there like that. Yeah. Yeah. It'd be, it'd be great to know all the things that, you know, you, you could get if you knew the right person or something. That could also be very dangerous. Yeah. Yeah, For sure. Is that your dog drinking, Chuck?

No, that's mine. You can hear that? Yeah. No, it's not me this time. It's not me this time. I swear. I had to let my... That sounds very familiar. My dog is definitely sitting right next to me because otherwise she was

over there getting all twacked out and nervous like, I gonna i'm gonna freak out he's on the air i'm gonna freak out yeah sorry about that that's a bulldog no worries yeah come on but we're a dog friendly show by default even if our dogs aren't friendly we both had barking dogs in the background at some point or another yeah yeah we have i i actually want to do these the yapper the yappy dog is all the way at the other end of the house yeah so hopefully you can't hear it but this one this one has to sit in here and i think she's done dude you could have just been like chuck calm down we can hear you drinking your water i would have told i would have ran with that for you ron it's all

good man it's all good well you guys got a good season going any uh cool uh clutches lately uh us yeah i mean yeah we're we're doing yeah he's not asking me we just hatched we just hatched the clutch of mertens and oh yeah that's right i saw those that's all those yeah we got more eggs out of some lace the other day and i've got another one that's gonna lay probably tomorrow yeah and then um you know all the anoles are really pop this will be the year that i can finally all the anoles are really pop. This will be the year that I can finally put the anoles out into the, into the public, which it's, I've been working on that since 2013. So it's about, about time. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. But a lot of it's,

it's, that's a lot of work that goes into establishing and, you know, species and especially when they're all wild caught or, you yeah you know you're putting together a big group that that's a difficult thing to do and i don't think people want to appreciate the time and energy that takes you know yeah no it's it's multiple multiple brand new morphs which were the only ones that are producing them and and so there's like five different mutations plus through two species were not, I mean, the Podior, which, you know, there's been a few produced here and there, but not a lot. And then the Ludogolaris, which as far as I know, we're currently the only one producing them. So getting those up to a colony size of, you know, about 20 adults that are, you know are producing well was a challenge and the mutation production alone

takes forever. I mean, everybody thinks it's like to develop new, because when you see the morphs in the market, usually they've already been developed and now all you have to do is buy a couple and you're cutting all of the bullshit that the originator had

the hoops that they had to go through which is what it's supposed supposed to happen but yeah it takes a long time yeah yeah and i took on too many at once there were just too many that popped up all at the same time so i was like i'm not letting these go by yeah so i ended up having to to know, prosecute five things at once. And then I ended up adding a couple others. So I've got other ones too, that down the line, you know, a year or two out, then they'll start coming online. So eventually with those giant anoles, you know, we'll,

we'll have eight to 10 mutations pretty quick, which is a lot for relatively, you know, new species that has been ignored anyway by the trade what what are the big uh ones that are blue and green and yellow what are what are that that's the podior that's okay yeah that's the one everybody dude i we put those up for sale they go yeah and people get pissed when you have to tell them no we're out you know in another month you I was surprised, honestly, at the response that I got from them. I really was unsure, especially

at the price tag. They're $2,500 a piece, which is what I paid for ours. I figured, we'll see. People are just willing to pay it. Eventually, it'll go down. As that goes down, I think that market's going to crack wide open. I think a lot of people are just willing to pay it. Eventually it'll go down.

But as that goes down, I think that market's going to crack wide open. I think a lot of people are, because they're really cool to look at. They display well and they're beautiful and they're extremely variable. So there's probably a lot of ways we can split off that and have high yellow ones ones high blue ones you know different mixtures and eventually i can inject the albinos into that and see what that does and stuff like that so because it's a subspecies of uh you know equestris it's equestris podior and then the albinos are all equestris floridanus okay so yeah very cool that's awesome to hear they're they're doing well for you and you're, you're getting them released now. So yeah, always a good, good, uh, kind of sigh of relief when you

can move them into, you know, other, other collections and hopefully they're, they do well with them. And you know, when, when they have a little bit of a price tag on them like that, then they're going to be more motivated to get them, you know, get them going and established and all that good stuff. Yeah. The people that have bought them have actually done stuff with them for the most part. So I'm already, I'm seeing them now starting to produce them. So that's, and that's what I needed to happen. You know, a lot of, a lot of let's just,

I've seen other breeders in the past go out of their way to when they have a new project to put those and the first animals into places where they're not going to ever have to worry about competition yeah but that's that actually works against you yeah that's a mistake it's a mistake yep it's short-sighted so yeah let's let's hit on that again that's short-sighted to sell the people who aren't going to be able to do well with the yeah. Yeah, it is. It absolutely works to your advantage. I just think it's just people are insecure about it. I just don't give a fuck.

I'll sell it to anybody. Trying to control where they go always blows up in your face. Yeah, it's impossible. Trying to control the market and all that kind of stuff. I've had people try to keep me out of projects. I just send a proxy. Yeah. And I'll send somebody that's not even involved in the reptile trade. So they have no way of tracing it back to me and I'll get what I want. Yeah.

So it's, so I fit, my assumption is that's what most people will do. That's what they're going to do. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. And I think, I think, and you've, you know, you've done all that, that, that pre-work to it. So you're, you know, you're way ahead. Yeah. So, right with the first time you had success, I could see maybe how that would be the case. But you've already lost. You've already fucked up if that's how you've done it. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I have done that. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Sure.

I've done that exact thing. built up a colony of, you know, 20 or so, you know, and probably more in some cases, you know, that to, to make sure your, your breeding group is strong and diverse and those kinds of things. So, you know, that's another part of it that, you know, takes, takes more time, but in the, in the long run that gives you a more, you know, good, strong base for, for success. And yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, very cool. Yeah. I'm, I'm,'m i'm happy i got some inland eggs on the ground so it's nice to have some more of those i haven't produced those for a few years now so good to have more that's just what you just have one clutch on the ground yeah just one it looks like another female or maybe two might still go so i thought you said possibly two possibly three so yeah yeah you're gonna be

swimming in metcalfe here soon man yeah but i mean there's been a lot of like it seems like when you don't have them that's when everybody's asking of course and right like everybody disappears but so we'll see if i'm sitting on a you you know, 30. Did you have any skink luck this year? They haven't gone yet, but there's a couple. I only paired up two females and while in my Westerns. So I'm, I'm hoping, but you know, last year my Western delivered a, a stillborn. So I was bummed out about that, but hopefully this year will be a little better. I moved, you know, two, two years ago now. And so, um, last year was pretty abysmal, but this year it's picking up nicely and getting things that, that took the

year off last year. So hopefully, uh, skinks will be all right, but yeah. I'm dead on the water for Westerns this year. My female came out of hibernation and died. no it was fine the male was everybody looked good she was eating one of those things that's a rough loss yeah it's a bummer yeah it's really had a pair so yeah i i have an uh one of the babies that i produced from the from the pair and i'm not sure if it's a a male or female because i put it with the known sex to see if I could see some behavior and, you know, maybe trade bloodline trade or something like that. But they just all got along just fine. Like no, no real strong like breeding behavior out of either of the either the female or the male, the female that just kind of saw, you know, so i don't know if they recognize that that's their offspring so they're like uh but i don't know maybe kind of funny so i still don't know on that one if it's a male or a female um it kind of

kind of talks female to me but you know who knows for sure it's so hard they're tough until they get pretty much adults and then yeah it's a little more it's fairly it's fairly straightforward but this one's going on three years now so get getting to the point where it should be you know sexable and things like that so we'll see what happens but it would be nice to get kind of i don't know if you can really get an unrelated animal but at least you know not from the same pairing right that kind of, I don't know if you can really get an unrelated animal, but at least, you know, not from the same pairing. Right. So we'll see. But I mean, these are, these seem to be the ones that I have are more of the, um, Western Australian look to them, you know, black and white ones. Yep. Yep. And then I know that there's some of the South Australian ones floating around too. I know my buddy had some out in California, had a pair of them that I think he got them from Thai Park, but yeah, those.

So is that the ones Randy had? darker overall they kind of uh aren't really very contrasting in pattern they their light bands are kind of more brown but they're still cool looking yeah i mean i love that skink that's getting badass yeah i think the only one that tops it in my book is this the multi-facet they're so cool i had those in the 90s too i could could kick myself. All the things I should have focused on. They're kind of an arid animal. I wonder how they do in Florida. They did okay.

We do all kinds of things that compensate for excess rain and shit like that based on where they're from. And so it's just, it's just not as simple as throwing them outside and saying, okay, you know, that's true. Have the elements, but, um, yeah, there are ways around all that stuff. So, all right. Well, I guess maybe that's a good segue to get into this. Let's go ahead. So today we're going to talk about keeping animals outdoors and kind of out a lot of issues, I'm sure, during that time.

So he knows both sides very well. So whatever side he gets, we're going to allow him to debate the other side from time to time, too, because we want to learn from him in any way we can. So first off, we'll flip between me and Chuck to see who goes head to head. So call it, my friend. Oh, that's heads. it my friend. Oh, that's heads. It's tails. Oh,

get the hell out. You can't win. Yep. Yeah. Winning all year. Yeah. Yeah. Man.

But that, that one was legit tails. He's been winning every coin toss this year. I haven't lost. Oh, you haven't lost. Yeah. I haven't lost a single. haven't lost yeah i haven't lost

a single last year since the new year i literally have did i lose one no i don't think this year you've lost one one right yeah so yeah you called it both ways you're like well yeah i'm like i called what it was and then and then you pick the opposite and then i picked the opposite so justin will win and he's like but that's like you know like that's stupid on a 50 50 and i'm like yeah but i just want you to know how much i own you in the coin toss so maybe all right well we're almost miserably this time so i'll take my one win this year. Yeah, all right. Well, I'm going to go ahead and debate Ron, if that's all right. No, that's perfect.

I want to sit back here and listen. I potentially want to do some outdoor enclosures, so I want to just sit back. Now, you bred your coast pulls outside, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I have an outdoor enclosure but i i would actually i'm thinking about doing something that's a little more involved and putting some more animals out there and you know i i wouldn't mind putting my diamonds out there and maybe try and met out there and and and mcdowell i so you know just do do my, uh, carpet pythons outside. Um, yeah.

Well, this is the man to learn from. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. All right, Ron, you ready to call it? Sure. Okay. What you got? It's heads. You got it. All right. Well, what side do you want to, you want to take? I'll take the, I guess I'll go ahead and take the pros. Take pro. Okay. Thank you. I have, I have very little experience keeping outdoors other than throwing stuff outside. I've got these, those, uh, these giant, like the, they're like chemicals for cow farms or something.

And then they wash them out. It's like some food additive. And then they're these giant like plastic carboys and I cut them in half and then I have, you know, these outdoor tubs that I can put stuff in. That's cool. I'd like to see that actually. That's something that I would steal. Yeah. So, and, and the, the farmers like want to get rid of them. They, they use up the stuff inside of them and then it's useless to them so they are those those opaque white ones yeah yep and they can't come they usually some of them have like a metal cage around them like a rebar like a rebar cage to reinforce them yeah i wondered where that came from yeah i see people i see people cut the kind of cut the the top off those and then use them for like aquaponics they'll'll put fish in them. And yeah,

that's where I got them from. The guy that I got them from was using them for that, but he got too many of them. So he's like, yeah. And now I've got them sitting in my yard. I need to like, and I, and I, I think I need to get them underneath the dirt and that's maybe something Ron can hit on. But you know, as far as keeping things in, in a, that kind of setup outdoors, but all right, well,

let's get into it. Do you want to go first or you want me to lead off? Oh, you, you go ahead and lead off. Okay. So, so I will preface this. I I've been watching some discussion on the desert lizard keeper group on Facebook or something. And there's some really, uh, high, uh, tension there, debate back and forth, which is really encouraging. So and, you know, there's talk about, you know, we need to understand what an animal needs. And a lot of times, I guess kind of one of the take homes that I got from that is you can control things a lot easier indoors. And as long as you know kind of what they need from the environment. And I guess the, maybe the consensus, if you can call it the consensus is that, you know, desert animals

need heat. And so if you can provide the proper heat, you know, uh, regimen, then they'll do great indoors. And so, and that's a little harder to control outside because temps drop and, you know, uh, in, in my area, there's frost and snow that can occur, you know, even in the middle of summer in some instances. So you really got to kind of watch those things. So I think that's kind of the idea of, you know, indoor keeping is you have a much greater level of control over, you know, what the animals are exposed to. You can kind of find the things they need and hit those levels a little easier, maybe not less expensively, but definitely, um, have more control over those things. So that's probably what I'd lead with as a benefit of

indoor keeping. Well, I actually can't argue with you on that because I agree with that. From my experience, yeah. I've heard a lot of people make really ignorant comments about keeping stuff outside over the years. Like, oh, you know, if you live in Florida, you just throw it outside and it does well and there's nothing to do and it's almost cheating. And let me tell you something. It is a hell of a lot harder to maintain animals outdoors than it is indoors for a variety of reasons. But there are very amazing benefits that you get if you can jump through the hurdles. I can't tell you how many times over the years, fairly novice people, and even people with a lot of experience indoors that have said,

oh, you know, I want to move my stuff outside and they'll ask for advice and I'll give them the advice. I'll answer their questions. Then they try it and they fail miserably on it, usually within the first couple of months. And there they pull out and that's because there's so you know if you're setting up an indoor setup there you just like you just said it's relatively straightforward you get the enclosure you get some lights you get some water system you get you know you can keep them in a climate controlled room. You pretty much can control the variables, but you'll never. I don't care how the technology goes. You're there's never going to be a light that's as good as the sun. It's just not ever going to happen. All the human hubris in the world isn't going to make that happen. So, you know, um, so the big benefit I feel is that one, I can provide much

larger enclosures than I could ever indoors because obviously the finite space. Um, the other thing is, is that my animals get, you know, they get access to rain, they get access to natural sunlight, they get access to, you know, a dew and, and all these things that they would get in a while that actually helped them. And in a lot of ways, you know, make them superior. As far as, you know, I don't know how to say this without sounding like an asshole. No, just say it. But no, but I mean, so when I go, when I see a lot of

collections, like I, I do check out a lot of lizard collection and their animals are healthy, but they never quite look, they certainly don't look like wild type. And mine, mine, certainly I can't, I couldn't say that mine look exactly like wild type because I'm, even though I'm doing them outside, I'm still missing stuff. You know know they're not getting the variety of diet that they would and stuff like that but my animals that are kept outside generally are more vibrant colored than the stuff that i see i have far less instances of you know like like you see a lot of like long-term captive herps that kind of get like rubbery legs and stuff, especially with lizards, you know, you see all this stuff.

Mine don't get that. And I think that part of that is, is because of they're in large enclosures with large, you know, they get a lot more exercise and they actually, when you, I've noticed that when I, if I bring the anoles inside, right. And I put them in a nice three foot by two foot enclosure in the living room and give them everything they need, they really don't do a whole hell of a lot. But the ones that are outside, they run all over the place, you know, they kind of revert back to wild state. So they're no longer tame. Like when I bring them inside, they're tame. You put them

outside, they're back to that, you knowiness so so and i think all that you know they build their muscles better there's just a lot of pluses there yeah but like i oh go ahead oh i i learned at an early age that yeah an animal indoors is not the same as an animal outdoor i had a golden tegu when i was a kid that's a classic example yeah i took it outside to give it a little sun and that thing just took off and i was i was running full speed and it was you know gaining on me and like oh crap i've lost it you know and it was headed um towards my my grandparents live next door so it was headed towards their house and so i'm like okay i can cut it off of the pass is it going to turn left or right so you know i kind of guessed on one direction and it headed that way and so i was able to cut it off and grab it and it was just trying to bite me and

crap and i'm like just pissed off and so like okay this is a different lizard i need to be a little careful when he's out out in the natural light so i see the same thing with the rankin's dragons i'll take them outside and they're you know freaking out looking for predators and they're looking at me like i'm a predator and oh gaping at me and you know trying to bite me and stuff you know there um so i guess that can be you know like you said it can it can give them tone and get them more you know less like a like a, a couch potato herb, you know, they're not, they're not all pasty white and fat and sitting inside, you know, they're robust and, and muscular and, you know, bright colored. So, you know, I, I, I, you know, I definitely concede that point, um, that, that they, they are, have advantage of living outdoors of being

more robust and robust and stronger. So I guess when you're talking about providing animals that may be kept as pets and people want to hold them and interact with them and that kind of thing, that could be a benefit of indoor keeping is that they're less in their wild state. And also, you know, I've heard, too, that that can be a challenge to breeding the animals when they're outdoors, always looking for predators. They don't want to come out. So you don't, you don't really, it's harder to monitor them because you can't see them as often because they're always hiding or always, you know, that kind of thing. So that might be, um, again, less control, little more randomness. You're not, you're not seeing them as often.

You're not able to seeing them as often. You're not able to monitor them as well. Of course, there's ways to overcome that, but that could be definitely a challenge, especially if you're trying to breed the animals and you want to make sure that you don't miss a clutch of eggs or things like that. For sure. That is a thing. I mean, I have stuff here that i won't see for weeks at a time but they're in there and they're fine now part of that is um that we because of the

you know the fear of predator thing you have to supply them with the ability to feel safe which means you have to give them a lot of shit to hide in cover you know stuff like that so our cages have so it's a fine line for us because we are commercial herpetoculturists we have to have we have to be able to find eggs so i can't i can't overload their enclosures with stuff to where i can't find eggs yeah so i take it right up to the line between um it's sort of a hybrid approach. It's similar to what you would do indoors, but it's kicked up about a 30 to 40% more intense as far as, you know, cage furniture and stuff like that. And then I've just had to learn how to find the eggs. Like the anoles lay one egg every seven days and we have, you know, there's like 50 females divided amongst, you know, five or six projects here.

So having to check a plan, they will only lay their eggs in this potted plant. I can't get them to lay in anything else. That's good though. Right. Cause then you know where they're going to lay. It is, but having to pull a potted plant every seven days and take all the cocoa fiber out for an egg that's the size of a jelly bean, it turns out it's quite time consuming. So that's why the cap on the anoles basically is going to be these 50 plants

that I have to check, and it'll never be beyond that because – Don said 50 is my number. Fucking don't give a shit about that. It takes four and a half fucking hours to service 50 plants. So, and I just don't want to work that hard. So, you know, I figured four and a half hours a week, like my entire Thursday, I do it on Thursday. So my entire Thursday is fucked essentially between that. And then, you know, you get stopped for, you know, you have to stop for all sorts of things.

So it ends up being an all-day ordeal everything i'm curious if you could trick them like just have like a fake i've tried you try i have tried all like listen julander i thought of that i i actually i actually made us put a second pot in there with the exact same substrate and just a just a stick sticking out of it. And they're like, fuck you. They use the pot every time I tried covering the potted plant with wire so they couldn't get to the substrate. And then they were just dropping the eggs on the fricking wire. And that was, that was a disaster because if I didn't find them right away, they desiccate, they desiccate super fast. Yeah. So I was like, okay, fuck this. I found a plant that could survive me meddling with it every week.

And, um, and then I repack it with cocoa fiber. Yeah. I pull out the dirt. It's the cocoa fiber that seems to be the thing, but there also seems to be some element to it where they need to feel it's the, their primary plant. So it's like where they hang out most of the time. And it seems to be for them, at least at this early stage in the domestication project process. Now maybe 10 generations down the road, this might not be a thing anymore.

They may, I mean, like bearded dragons, you can literally take them and put them in a five gallon bucket full of dirt and they will dig a hole and lay an egg. There it is right there. Yeah. But I remember 30 years ago, I don't think I could have pulled that off when they were relatively new to the trade because they were much more nervous. They were a different animal. Right. Yeah.

And so. Yeah. Domestication definitely has its. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. So. And Ron, so question for you like so when you're when you're kind of

setting up outside do you tend to find that you start very basic and then kind of add and kind of see like like kind of take the the pulse of it and make changes are you constantly until you kind of get your like you know i know this this is the way i do my yard with plants where not all plants do well in certain areas so i have to like start them here and oh fuck it's not doing so well and i move it over here and i'm like oh it's doing better and oh it needs this okay cool i find this spot and it's like that's it that's perfect do you it is exactly what you described okay okay that's exactly it like i've i've had enclosures that I thought, I have to take into account sun position year round. One thing I do is before I set up enclosures, I'll pick a spot where I think I want to put it and then I'll pick a few alternate spots.

Then about once every three or four weeks, I'll go out there and I'll take a photo of it at noon. The sun on the ground. So that by the time I'm ready to do it, I can go back and say, okay, this place gets full sun exposure all year. This place gets fucked by the trees at the neighbor's yard when the sun starts to lower in the sky in the winter and stuff like that. that so because i've made a twelve thousand dollar error and built an unmovable structure for my lace monitors that i had mistakenly guessed um that that the entire thing would get full sun exposure all year but it turns out that there's a fucking tree that basically has made the end cap which is two enclosures completely unusable because in the winter time it's shaded all the time it's just because your sun path drops your yeah you know your your sun sits lower in the sky so you you don't get the the same arc as you do when you do it in the summer yeah yeah and i gotta go ring that tree kill it yeah yeah the problem is is it's like a like an 80 foot freaking oak tree so it ain't going over

and uh yeah and and it's hanging over my house so yeah we couldn't even cut it down if we wanted to without risking it's just a it's a disaster so so but it turned out so what i did was we spent the last two years trying to figure out well what could we use this eight by eight by eight foot square? And then these 13 monkey tailed skinks came up and I was like, well, they will fucking love this because it's cool all summer because it's, it's shaded all the time and, uh, and it's in this perfect spot. So we set them up in there. I put all these ramps and, and, and, uh, shelves and pot and one side. So what i did was i actually blocked off half of it so they're in a four by eight by eight right now it's eight feet tall eight feet long and

four feet wide the back half we just planted a shit ton of pothos which is what they eat yeah and we're gonna it's coming in a rainy season so it'll rain every day that whole cage will fill up with both those and when it's full i'll open it up and then they'll be able to we won't even think about feeding them for maybe maybe indefinitely very cool so that's that's definitely one of the huge high points that i could see especially if you're working with uh you know omnivores or vegetarians that you can grow your own plants. You know that we feed all of the bearded dragons and I fed and bred every cycler and every iguana I ever worked with, every species actually. And I've never bought greens at the grocery store.

I have used always the weeds that grow naturally, vines and weeds. We figured out what they eat and what which what's what they can eat and honestly it's way way better than the shit you get at the grocery store yeah most people don't really realize that we've had friends come over and they're like they see we're doing that and they're like what the fuck i got this all over my yard i'm like yeah it's great wash it off throw it in you never have to buy the shit we i think I think when Heather and I got together, she had always, you know, gone to the store and bought the greens and I'm like, no, no, no. I'm like, look at this. You can feed them this, this, and this.

So she started doing it. She noticed that the dragons looked way better on this because they're getting a better diet and they were ravenously eating it. And she said it's saving us like i think she said it saves us eleven thousand dollars a year wow yeah so that's awesome yeah yeah i think that's definitely uh i mean i i've done that for years but the the best thing that grows around here for herbs is like dandelions and well yeah i wish i had that i can't grow that here at all really i thought they grew everywhere they're just like no it dies

our neighbors i was looking at our neighbor's yard and it's just full of them it's almost more dandelion than grass i'd be using the hell out of that yeah yeah but you but you have to make sure that they haven't sprayed them you know that kind of thing so yeah i'll usually only trust them in my own yard right that's that's what we. Yeah. So I don't mind if dandelions grow in the yard, although my wife's not the biggest fan, you know? So, but yeah, I, I think that's a huge benefit of, of keeping outdoors. That's, that's really cool. And, and I love that story you told last time you were on about the roaches.

I just got a kick out of that. Oh yeah. We were actually ripping up a couple of other beard dragon enclosures because we had one lay eggs under the platform. And it was full of those roaches. And as soon as I popped the things off, all the dragons just started grabbing as many roaches as they could. Yeah. You could see the dragons will go out and dig through the substrate looking for roaches. And they make them burst out of the ground and they eat them. Yeah. And I mean, that's all extremely beneficial. Like, but when you tell novice people, they're like, Oh my God, well, what if it has pesticides? And what if it has, I'm like, okay,

well it's in our yard. We don't spray anything ever. Yeah. Yeah. And then, and, um, I mean, have you looked, you know what they spray the stuff you buy at the grocery store? Yeah. You know what the commercial insect feeders by and large feed their stuff. They're getting plenty of chemicals. Trust me. So you're, you're, it's just, it's just the mindset that we have. Like I've never bought substrate. I don't buy fucking substrate. I use the dirt in my own yard. I've never bought substrate. I don't buy fucking substrate.

I use the dirt in my own yard. I've always done that. That's better. I mean it's free and it's there and it's the same shit. There's really not – we just have a lot of ideas that we're kind of just – you know, I'm sorry. That coffee's kicking my ass. We live in a very engineered world. You know, man has engineered all these things.

And we think that we have to use all these engineers. We get away from like old school, like my grandparents composted and they gardened. They weren't dependent upon buying all their potting soil or whatever. They were making it in the yard. I think people are kind of afraid of that. They think, oh, well, if I start start using that stuff there might be bugs in it and my reptiles might get mites or something you know what i mean like like that's like they automatically go from you know a healthy biotic diversity equals snake mites or something like that you know yeah and and you're probably more insulated against snake mites having a

healthy biotic diversity than you would be having an abiotic, uh, you know, uh, situation. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I have intimate knowledge of a lot of the large scale commercial, uh, herbiculture places. I have never had a lot of the problems at all that a lot of these guys deal with on a regular basis and that's i attribute that to the fact that they're outside and and you know either natural sunlight there's not overuse of quads you know and all that um i i think that in a lot of ways that that comes back to bite you in the ass. Just technology doesn't make things better necessarily. It makes things different. And sometimes it is better, but a lot of times it's just different.

And a lot of times it has negative things. So I love my technology, but I'm also unwilling to be chained to it. So I'll look outside, like you said, for natural ideas. And it's not for any ideology or anything like that. It's just because it's there. So it just seems like, why are you not taking advantage of it? Well, and I mean, you can have technology and technology is good but you as a human lack the diagnostic equipment to tell if that light is actually giving the right

amount of uv you know or or whatever you have to have equipment to tell you that or or you have to rely on a company who says no this is what the spectral curve looks like for this. And, you know, we've talked about this when we were talking about UV is the manufacturing, a little change in the manufacturing process where they're sourcing their material, whatever, can completely change something. And maybe they're batch testing. Maybe they're not. You just you don't know. But, you know, the it's it's the same all the time right you know what i mean it's all i'd like i'd like to hit on a point there too because um as as beneficial as the sun is it's also very dangerous right it can kill for sure as easily as it can help them you know so and you know i think uh a lot of reptiles are designed to use, you know, partial shade or things like that. And, you know, obviously UV lights or UV rays bounce and kind of come at the side and things.

It's not just direct sunlight that it needs. But I think, you know, maybe a novice keeper thinks, oh, I'm just going to keep them outside and they'll give them full sun so they can, you know, benefit from the sun and then they cook outside. And that is the number one thing that I say. And that's why we do not recommend to anyone at all. They try to copy the stuff we do. I put the information out there. So if you're interested in it and you're willing to do the research, you can benefit from it. But I in no way am advising anyone to do what, to try to mimic what we do or what Crutchfield does or any of these guys that keep stuff outside,

because there's a lot of thought that has to go into it. You really have to pick the right spot. You have to pick, you have to then, and outfit the caging, just like you said. We use a tiered system. So we have shade and sun availability at multi-levels. So that creates a gradient upwards. And also we also do it, you know, we do it both horizontally and laterally. So they have, and it's about giving them choices. Like you can. Yeah. If you keep stuff outside, it has to have all of the choices necessary to survive.

It has to have a safe, secure hiding spots. It has to have access to shade at all times. It needs to have access to sun for a majority of the time that the sun is active in the sky. And that's it's just not a simple thing. Then, you know, it has to have water delivery and depending on the type of animal it is, we use soaker hoses on anoles and chameleons that run for an hour a day per enclosure every other day or like right now it's super dry. So now they're running every day for an hour to make up for the heat and the wind.

But when rainy season comes, I might not run them at all for six months. So it's a constant thing of turning dials and manipulating the environment. And that's a big con because it's – and we can do this because we literally never leave. We're always here. So we don't go to jobs. We don't have to be away. And when one of us has an appointment or something, usually the other one stays here, you know, we, we do stuff together,

but if we're like going on vacation, we have people that then stay here. Yeah. So, you know, we have, um, and that person that we would use for that is also a fucking very good professional herbalist with a lot of outside experience. And he's one of the only people that I could think of on this planet that I would trust to sit here and manage this place when we're not here. Yeah. Yeah.

I definitely don't have, I mean, you know, I'm talking about keeping some pretty bulletproof carpets outside. I definitely don't have the balls for, you know, doing, doing lizards and stuff that could be, you know, touchy. And well, I mean, honestly, though, when you're, you're skill level, you probably would have no, no problem. I mean, I think, I think, I think it's just, you kind of got to, it's kind of like, it's kind of like the, you know,

you keep indoors and then you learn bioactive. Right. And you're kind of like you keep indoors and then you learn bioactive, right? And you're kind of like, oh, that's another layer towards keeping in an enclosure inside. And then when you go outside, it's like that completely next level because now you're dealing with all of those things plus other biotic factors, dynamics. It's so much more fluid. You have to be so much more on top of it. It is it's, it's kind of, I think, you know, kind of to your point, keeping outside is kind of the pinnacle, it's kind of the apex of keeping and, and I think it's, it's probably, like you said, easier to keep inside because you have better control. But, you know, I mean, for me, you know, to be able to be successful outside is very rewarding. It's very rewarding.

Yeah. Yeah. On multiple levels. The primary thing that I get from keeping stuff outside, above all else, is that it doesn't require much work. Yeah. What requires is knowledge and, and hyper observancy. Yeah. But it doesn't require a lot of labor.

Once they're outside and they're set up in these big things, they're, there's really not, you don't clean anything because nature takes care of it super quick. There's so many insects and wild lizards in all of the enclosures that every feces get taken away like fast like you don't even they're gone yeah and um and then all of the other you know things that are there and um so that's the big reason that i push so hard to do it because i'll be perfectly honest i've got a 2 000 square foot building here and if i really wanted to i could turn that into a lace monitor breeding thing and i would crank lace monitors out but i don't do that because one i don't want to force them inside under fake lights

and shit like that i I enjoy watching them outside. They're outside off my back porch. We sit out on the porch and we watch them do their thing. And you know, we'd lose that if we put them in the building and the hoops that I've had to jump through to get those to breed. I'm positive that if, if, uh, the, they would not reproduce in the wild in Florida, they wouldn't, they wouldn't do it. They don't get hot enough. So I've had to cover them with plastic sheeting in the summertime. Their cages are so hot during the day that it's unbearable to be in there. And I could not produce them until I did this. Like I, they would get gravid and I get nothing and not gravid, but you know, they would go through the process. Females would swell up and then nothing would happen.

And I was getting super aggravated. I'm like, what the fuck? And then I started looking and it's because it coincided with the rainy season. It would, it would be 96 degrees and then two o'clock would come and the sky would open up and it'd pour for an hour, drop their body temperature to 78 degrees or so. And then it screwed them up. So I was like, okay, now that I see what the mechanism that's causing this,

I covered the tops in clear plastic and I covered the backs, only the front of this. It's like 48, it's 64 foot long and multi-sectional enclosure. Only the front is open now. The rest of it is totally enclosed. And the sun hits it directly. And it's so fucking hot. And now they're jamming.

They're beating level one way up. It was the same thing with the Mertens. The Mertens were not getting hot enough. I moved them to a place that's so stupidly hot that I had to reserve. It was my section of the property that I thought, well, if we ever decided to do Uromastyx, this is the place. White sand, it's very hot. It gets full on a, on a, on, on impeded sunlight from the very earliest

hours in the morning until the very end of the day. So it's like really hot. I put those things there, they started laying eggs and they started eating and everything was fine. So, but I, but even them, I have half of their cage covered in plastic too. Like it's so hot underneath there. And I have black PVC basking platforms that you, I threw an egg on one, a raw egg, and they started to cook. These things were laying on it.

It's hard to really realize how much heat those things need to breed. If 100 of those got away in Florida, I don't think it would ever be more than 100 of them. I don't think they can complete the cycle here

because they can't get hot enough on their own. So, but if I shoved them in that building, I could crank up the heat all the time. They never see any rain. I could, I could raise that building temperature to whatever I wanted pretty much. And, uh, you know, but it was, it's the, it's the rain that was screwing us up. It wasn't even so much that the rain dropped the ambient temperature because after the sun comes back up, it rockets back up. It was the rain was hitting the, they were laying out in the rain there. The cold water was dropping their body temperature. And so I just denied them the ability to get to rain and then have, have basically used this plastic to, to superheat it.

And now everybody's doing good. What about a compromise, like an indoor outdoor type setup where you have, you know, a door through the, through the wall of the building and they can access the sun and outdoor and then bring them in when it's cooler. Yeah, that's, that's another, that is an idea. We floated that idea. We were thinking about picking up a pair of Bolin's pythons and giving them a really cold

air conditioned room and then running a, you know, an outdoor thing. They could go and get out in the sunlight and in the rain and all that when they wanted to. And it's something we may do down the road right now that room is full of um a xanthochristic echoes which i don't know why i have them but whatever um but uh they uh yeah that is that i've seen that actually done my buddy dave vikani had did that with cycl to a really good effect. And he was actually in this lives right down the street from where we live now. And that that that idea definitely works. It's good. It's a good one.

And right now we use the building as an indoor outdoor a knoll thing. I built this enormous knoll. I've got these huge Home Depot carts, you know know the ones that you put your lumber on and so then outside kind of an idea but you're manually moving them back and forth and the only reason I do that with the anoles is because

the screen cages are you know the predators just go right through them so we roll them into the building at night to keep raccoons and shit off of them and yeah we had to do that but if i could keep them outside um all the time i would they i mean they live all over the place they live where we live they're they're naturalized here yeah so um but you know the raccoons are my house house is, is besieged, man. But, oh, you know what?

Here's a funny story. I haven't told a lot of people this yet, but three days ago I went outside my fucking yard and, and my dog lost her shit. She was, there was something sitting on top of the bananas, pectinata enclosures, and it was big. And I was looking at it and I didn't have my glasses on and I thought, is that our fucking cat? And as I walked over closer to it, it was a fucking ring

tail lemur, a big one. What? I screamed it, it freaked out and it fucking, because it startled the shit out of me. I couldn't, it turned around and looked at me and I was like, holy shit. And I was like i was like oh my god i gotta catch that thing and it took off my dumb ass dog following it it ran it jumped into the trees and then and then it disappeared

into the brush in towards the front of our property i know there are people around here that there's there's supposedly someone close to us that has monkeys. And I'm assuming that that. Yeah. Yeah. I never seen one. I couldn't believe it. I was like, I really don't want this fucking thing in my yard. Cause I don't want my neighbors to think that's mine. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That was from funny. I was listening to a podcast that, you know, it was a reptile based podcast,

but they were talking to somebody who had experience with primates and reptiles. And he was talking about the primates. He said those ringtail lemurs can pretty much scalp you like they're, they're bite is extremely powerful. You wouldn't expect it from them, but they can mess you up. If you, if you, I couldn't, I could not believe it. I was like, what are the chances? That's crazy. Right. i'm assuming it was in because of all you know we have all these other animals and yeah yeah like at night on one of the

ring cameras we had when we moved into this house right there was only one screen on all of the windows there's like 12 windows in this house and none of them had screens. The first night, Heather and I are sleeping, and we hear this fucking loud bang. And we both jumped out of bed, and she's like, somebody's trying to break in. And I look, and the freaking screen is somebody, we thought it was somebody, pulled it out and bent it over. Right? Oh, yeah. So we pulled up the security cameras, and it was a troop of raccoons with two possums in tow walking along the front of the thing. And one of the raccoons grabbed the freaking screen and pulled it off.

And then we found out from the previous people that they lost all the screens by raccoons trying to get in the house. And they stopped replacing them after a while because they got tired of them being broken. So having the dogs, does that help? Well, we only had a Yorkie up until, up until recently,

but when the, when the robbery thing was going on, we, we got an Alapaka, Alapaka blue blood bulldog, which she's just a year old, but she, you know, she's more to year old. She's more to

alert me. This is more of a fuck the dog, beware of owner kind of place. Yeah. The dog's just the warning system to whoever, right? Yeah. Here's your fair warning.

Thank God that got resolved. That's fucking crazy. Mixed species roving bandits. I mean, that was the craziest video. I looked at it. It's like five or six raccoons and there's two fucking possums right behind them. The raccoon gang with his two fucking oddball buddies.

Never seen anything like it. That's nuts. But it's because we live in a place where it's surrounded by city, but these are a few five-acre lots out here that are left, so there's a lot of wildlife here. Yeah, concentrated. And it's cool, but you better have your shit locked up

because between the foxes, the bobcats, the now fucking lemurs apparently heather freaked out she's like you gotta call animal control i'm like i'm not fucking calling animal control we'll we'll set out if it comes back we'll set out a trap and i'll try to find out who has it and get it to them yeah yeah so it's pretty funny it thought the peccanada she just really didn't shot me the bird by the way she heard me say that yeah that's crazy well and i guess that you know goes to another aspect of you know one of the

things you need to be careful of keeping outdoors is you know predators you need to make your enclosures predator proof and and that can be costly you know the right screen or wire mesh is not cheap and you know that can that can definitely uh the make your pocketbook lighter um and you know right now lumber and stuff like that is very expensive and you know that's it's just gone ridiculously uh through the roof you know i think i saw a sheet of like just just chipboard plywood was like what 10 bucks you know a few years ago and it's like up to 45 50 dollars a sheet just ridiculous you know so that's got to be uh a little tricky or difficult at this time to build those outdoor cages and things.

Go ahead. No, I was just going to say, we use 16 gauge vinyl coated half by half inch welded wire, which is, I mean, it's so fucking difficult. We have to use electric,

I mean, cordless freaking grinders to cut that shit because it's too hard to cut with with tin snips um and nothing's going to get in that or out but that's the double the two-sided to that is if you're keeping shit outside you better damn well make sure that it can't get out and i mean i've been doing this for 30 some odd almost 40 years now outdoors the entire time you can go to any place that i ever lived and you're not going to find a thing that's attributable to me but that's not been the case with some like all this invasive here none of that was people dumping pets we all know exactly who did what and it was basically importers and one

particular well-known and very narcissistic large-scale breeder who allowed a bunch of shit to get loose and then basically taunted the authorities when they told him to clean it his mess up and now we're paying the price for this because they're actually passing laws that are intended to address what he did. And so, yeah, that's rough because you can't listen when it, a couple of animals being dumped,

the chances that they're going to be that opposite sexes of, are going to be dumped in the same area at the roughly the same time. I mean, come on, think about that. That's fucking stupid. I mean, it doesn't make any sense. What it was is, is it was, it was importers that got bad shipments and rather than freeze the stuff, if they got a bad shipment of a couple hundred iguanas they took them out let them go or which gets back to my point um they had shitty run down fucking enclosures in all the cases that i just mentioned that was the primary uh problem is that

they were using they weren't they built enclosures initially and then over time they started to rot and they didn't fix them yeah and so shit started to get away and you know where they had you know employees that were you know didn't care shit gets out and they don't open the door and runs out oh well we got more and all of that actually is even forgivable if you fucking clean up your mess if something it's really not hard now that's the one i had i've only had one incident i had an incident where in 2004 where um i used to have these 200 250 pound english mastiffs they got a fucking baseball bat for a tail and one of them knocked off a tank in my garage that had baby hybrid tegus and the tank smashed 20 27 tegus escaped um they got out of my garage because my garage door was

had you know wasn't garage doors aren't really tight. Baby baby slept right through them. Yeah. And over the course of two weeks I caught every one but one and that one I caught six months later I, I accounted for 100% of them. But what I did when I found out they were gone, a fucking, my world stopped for that two weeks. I did nothing but hunt those things in my neighborhood until I got every goddamn one. I told every neighbor about it.

I said, look, there's this little banded lizards. They're going to be on the ground. If you see them, give me a call. Here's my number. You know, they're only about a foot long. They're harmless, but I need to get them all. I got 100%. So I really have a hard time with the idea that, oh, well, you know, these animals got away, but it's not my fault. It was my employee's fault. Yeah, but you knew about it. And you knew about it for years. And you did nothing. And when Fish and Wildlife tried to address it with you, you told them that none of it was yours and that it wasn't your problem. It's kind of hard to explain how all of these rare lizards are in abundance, you know, 80 or 90 cyclura, freaking tegus, big monitors all over the place.

Kind of hard to explain that they're not yours when you live far you're out in the middle of nowhere and there's and there's all this and there's all the like yeah it's all radiating out from one point yeah and so that it's almost it's kind of insulting right if i were fishing wildlife i would be pretty insulted by that yeah i mean now now in their for their responsibility in this they've definitely uh taken this situation and and instead of used it to their yeah instead of beating the the perpetrators who they know they know who's directly responsible for the taggers they know they've known since 2002 we all who, who did that and they've done nothing to them. Instead we're all of us that have been doing this legally forever.

Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of us in a state, we're going to pay a price for the hubris of a, of a couple of fucking assholes. And it's just bullshit. I honestly can't believe that some of the stuff that's being proposed is happening. But I mean, I'm really torn on it because half of me is like, well, kind of made our bed here. Yeah.

But again, why the hell, why the hell do we punish everyone for the actions of those people that did it should be punished? Well, I mean, it's the same, you know, if you, you talk about gun legislation, I like guns, uh, but the people who suffer the predominance of the stupidity of gun regulation are the people who do it right you know what i mean and the people who fuck it up are the ones that they that that is easy to point at like yeah this is why we can't have nice things like and everybody in the situation is like yes that's

exactly why we can't have nice things go fucking take care of that yeah yep and we we we try we think we can stop stupidity by making enough laws. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't – yeah. Or stop criminal. Yeah. I mean a criminal does not care about your laws.

Yeah. Adding more laws doesn't matter. It makes them a criminal. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Criminals are people that do not give a fuck about that. So –

Yeah. California just pretty much outlawed ghost guns and they're still pulling off for criminals. Like, I mean, duh. Like, yeah. Come on, man. Let's be honest. If somebody wants to fucking kill you, they're going to kill you. They don't need a gun to do it. There's a million ways to do it. Most of the, there's a lot of better ways to do it than with a gun. And so, I mean, I mean, if you think it's just, I don't know, man, just, we've just lost all sense of all common sense has just been thrown out the door. Any thought about, it's just this guy. And it really, honestly, I think if you distill it down, it, it's basically most of these laws are just people hate somebody else because of what they do. They just don't like what you do and they hate you for it. So they pass these laws and say, Oh, it's for the environment. Oh, it's for the conservation. Oh, it's for this, that.

And the other thing is to protect the children or whatever bullshit, but they don't give a fuck about that. And their actions prove that because none of the things they're doing does any of what they're claiming. It just punishes somebody that you don't like because they have, they, they like something you don't. Yeah. And I mean, it depends on the lawmakers in office, you know, you can get some that are sympathetic or that are like cool with what you're doing. And we've seen some, you know, law changes for the good here in Utah, where they've changed, you know, regulations and things

in a, in a kind of make sense manner. It's, it's really kind of bizarre. It'd be nice if that takes off. Hot on. Yeah. Yeah. Let's hope that spreads, but it doesn't show much signs of that, especially nationally. But yeah, that's a, that's a tricky thing. And yeah, it only takes one person to kind of ruin it for the rest of us. So yeah, like, like Ron said, make sure you've got yourself, your stuff contained and you do it the right way. If you're going to keep outside.

And it's really not difficult, honestly. I've done this most of my life with very little money. Like I just had to make do with what we got and it's all, it's really not expensive. Doesn't require, it costs a lot of money to be, you just have to be smart about it. Go look at what, you know? Um, so the, the, uh, the excuses that are thrown around when I see the, these problems where we, you know, you have these large escapes, they're all fucking bullshit. Like there was no reason for it in any of these cases. Yeah.

Except for maybe laziness or a poor attitude about it. Yeah. Arrogance, whatever, but that's, uh, or people just didn't think it mattered. But I mean,

I, I distinctly remember in the late eighties, maybe early eighties, all the importers in Miami, um, they would get bad shipments and they would let a lot of stuff go. The thing is, is that there was always this unspoken rule. You don't let go fucking predators. It's one thing to let go some fricking, you know, African redheaded agamas in a city where literally nothing lives. Like I helped

an FWC biologist in 2004 for a couple of days, locate a whole bunch of these introduced species because he was doing this initial study. I think it was 2004. It was early 2000s anyway. And when he was done, they concluded that most of those species that they're currently listing, you know they you see bandied around 49 invasive species of reptiles yeah but the vast majority of them were considered non-invasive because they were inhabiting this inside the city zone where literally there is nothing native and they were filling in niches that were vacated when the native got wiped out by humans yeah so so they weren't they're not harming anything and they can't get out of the city limits because the microclimate in the city is much warmer than

when you go out to like the everglades so they can't radiate outwards and a lot of those most of those things are these small lizards most of them are like little anoles little agamas yeah and the curly tails actually had nothing to do with the pet trade all those came from cruise ships in the like the 30s or 40s um so you know you had all this stuff that wasn't a problem but we but everybody knew back then you know don't go letting fucking pythons go or monitor lizards or tagus or any of these big predators that could spread out. That would be a problem. Yeah. So the people that did that can go fuck themselves because I just have no,

there's no sympathy for that at all. I mean, they shouldn't have been dumping anything at all, but it was a thing that was done in the 80s and 90s yeah yeah it was just this thing where no winning nobody ever even really thought about it in the terms that we think about it now back then a different time yeah yeah but but everyone knew don't let freaking burmese pythons go sure yeah sure i mean that was just you know i i saw a talk here at uh you University. There was a guy that came and talked about Burmese pythons. They did some studies in it. From his conclusions, it seemed like there was a single event of somebody releasing a gravid Burmese python in the Everglades in the 70s and that you know had you know was probably pissed off because it was gravid and then you didn't want to deal with it so he dumped it and

then it had you know the eggs and and the babies just kind of radiated out from there but that's possible they're very related you know and I don't think that's necessarily the only story but that was one of the studies they did they were able to track kind of a radiation of these related animals from the everglades out which was you know pretty interesting well i'm pretty sure that since then they they have discovered that um genetically they were from a vietnam shipment in 1994 that they can trace to a specific person who was notorious for dumping large shipments of reptiles. And this, this guy, I mean, the hurricane Andrew Ron's like, that's a good story,

but here's the real story. All right. Yeah. I mean, like I said, it's not just one event necessarily. Yeah. Yeah. And it's possible. I mean, I used to catch African rock pythons in Medley, Florida back in the early 1980s. But this was in the middle of the city, and they were confined to a canal where this place called Pet Farm used to be. And you could catch all kinds of shit there,

because Pet Farm lost all kinds of stuff. But African rocks were actually breeding on this canal. So I caught babies and 16 foot ones and everything in between and that's crazy yeah yeah we used to catch caiman there and just out catching came adult caimans and um and if you did it on a cold morning you would often catch african rock pythons trying to warm up really don't bask in so that's cool so i guess what what is the is there a big concern with like hurricanes and stuff taking out you know uh outdoor enclosures and what what's kind of the

i guess what do you do in in that case if there's a big storm moving through that could potentially damage outdoor caging yeah i. I've been through plenty of them, Hurricane Andrew and then all the ones after. So what we do, first of all, the enclosures that I built, like the ones that I built when I lived in Palm Beach withstood three hurricanes back to back, they, they took the hurricanes fine. My house got battered up more than the cages did. Cause you know, if you build them, so the wind goes through them and and you know they're heavy enough and there's enough substrate it's going to take a category

four or five to really fuck them up and at that point you're not going to have a house anyway so who cares yeah yeah but um yeah but the other thing that we do is you don't leave your shit out in that you have we have an entire freaking room full of boxes that we have enough that we can box everything up if we have to and either take it to a safe place or store it in the house somewhere in a safe room. Yeah. So again, not difficult stuff to do and you better fucking do it because you live in a

state where, you know, natural disaster. Well, I mean natural, I mean, honestly we actually have it better in Florida because you get in a state where, you know, natural disaster. Well, I mean, natural, I mean, honestly, we actually have it better in Florida because you get plenty of warning with hurricanes. It's not like we're sitting around one day and, Oh shit, there's an F4 tornado barreling down.

Not a whole lot of time to do anything about that. We usually get a weak heads up, you know, Hey, this, you know, you can look at the weather patterns and go, Oh, look, this is likely to steer into us when it gets to this point. So, you know, Hey, this, you know, you can look at the weather patterns and go, Oh, look, this is likely to steer into us when it gets to this point. So, you know, I generally wait until about 48 hours out when I, it's because I don't like to disrupt things for no reason. Yeah. And, so about 48 hours out, we'll start prepping all the boxes and then 24 hours out, we'll pull everything and you know, and yeah, that would be a long process. I'm sure for your collection too. Actually not. I mean, it takes about four or five hours, but yeah.

I mean, I, I also usually will call in the cavalry. I'll I'll call in a couple of friends of mine and say, hey, you know, I need to do it. But that's another reason why I don't keep croc monitors anymore and stuff like that. The lace are the biggest thing I have. They're very easy to work. You know, they're tame. You just go in there. They pick them up, put them in their little box and they're good to go.

That's one of the main reasons I've been downsizing all the big stuff. I got rid of the black throats because they were, you know, 80 pound monsters and hard to lug around. Yeah. That's one of the main reasons I've been downsizing all the big stuff. I got rid of the black throats cause they were, you know, 80 pound monsters and hard to lug around. Yeah. So that's why I've stayed away from water monitors, all that stuff. Because of that reason, it's just, it's not fun to have to move huge things. And some years you get three or four scares, you know, where this is supposed to be a particularly bad year. So we're kind of a little on edge about that one, but no,

a couple of years, I can remember a few years in recent history where we've had very close calls where we had to pull everything at the last minute. Usually we were spared by, you know, a jog to the North or a jog to the South or something like that. But it's, it's a nightmare pulling it and then having to put it all back and everything's all like fucking frazzled. Cause you know, they're, they were, I don't know. Yeah. Keep keeping outdoors definitely requires an added level of vigilance. I mean, you know,

even if you don't live in it, like, like in, in my backyard, if I want to keep stuff outside, I have to be aware of when, you know, frost events are likely to occur and pull stuff in. So it doesn't get, you know, or at least have the cage designed so they can at least, you know, find a place to weather the storm. Right. That's what we do. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's kind of a trick to, you know, you're right that's what we do yeah yeah so that's that's kind of a trick to you know you've got to have those kind of things built in yeah i'm just gonna say it though uh you know i think the human race could you know benefit from being a little more plugged into what's going on outside of their home you know with the with the environment with you know so and that's where technology can can

really lend a hand as you you have everything at the touch of your fingertips you know you can set alarms when temps are hitting a certain spot you know you can you you put out uh temperature probes or whatever to alert you so there's ways to mitigate that especially with the technology we have now but you know technology can fail and you know you. So there's ways to mitigate that, especially with the technology we have now. But, you know, technology can fail and, you know, you need to really pay attention to what's going on. You can't just kind of set it and forget it to some extent.

Yeah, I mean, we do that. We have thermometers in various enclosures all around to let us know what the temperatures are getting. In the wintertime, we cover everything with six mil plastic, clear plastic. You just get it at Home Depot in big 100-foot rolls. So we cover everything in that, and then we roll – we vent it depending on the temperature. So if it's a super cold day, we'll only vent it a couple inches,

and then it keeps the enclosures around 85 degrees during the daytime. Now, they get cold as shit at night because it does nothing to heat them. But as long as they can get hot in the daytime, the cold's not a problem. Do you utilize kind of like a thermal sink where you can have something that heats up and can radiate

that heat throughout the night? Nope. That's just too difficult. Subfloor. yeah ours go underneath the floor so they're all the all the enclosures that are outside are directly on the ground i found out the hard way a long time ago that if they're above the ground even by an inch if the air can get under there when it gets below 40 degrees it'll kill a lot of stuff so what we found was putting it directly on the ground because the earth you know stays warm and uses that uses the ground as a sink it's a giant yep exactly so then we put a

secondary all the enclosures have um the subfloor which that's where almost everything sleeps at night and when they're under there i mean it's essentially like a deck right so i mean it's a it's thick wood it's screwed down i can't get them out unless i unscrew it's essentially like a deck right so i mean it's a it's thick wood it's screwed down i can't get them out unless i unscrew it's a fucking nightmare if i have if i'm forced to have to get stuff out but if a tornado ran over those enclosures it's very likely that that subfloor would still be intact and they would be fine underneath there yeah so it's kind of like a little mini reptile bomb shelter sort of thing. And it works for a variety of reasons. One, it makes it very hard to rob.

It's very hard. I mean, it's, you can't even get your arm. Yeah. To find them. I mean, I make sure that they're the significant portion of the enclosure. So they could literally be anywhere under the floor. And that makes, that makes that. So it heads against that.

It hedges against, you know, extremes in any direction. It's always, you know, it's on the floor. So when it's super hot outside, they just go under there and they're cooler than they would be. And when it's cold, it stays. So on nights that it's like, let's just say one night I can remember this year, it was 37 degrees and I temp gunned it underneath the floor and it was 55 okay so yeah and and keep above that freezing point oh yeah they never even when shit's covered in ice like the plastic will be covered in ice but yeah underneath there it's

still in the 50s so do you do you do your uh those cages like that do they go into the ground or do they have like a you have a metal sub like a great sub flooring right or well i build i build it we build the cages they're fully enclosed right they're wire bottom so the whole and then we sit them on the ground then we put in the sub floor right i use it's basically just about you know a couple inches inches above the actual bottom of the cage. So they can go under that. So it's just like a deck, really. I call it a subfloor, but it's really a deck.

But you don't have any, like, substrate so they can burrow below this? No. Underneath the subfloor? No. So once they go under, they go into the subfloor. And then on top of the subfloor in the wintertime, I'll take full bags of mulch unopened and just stack them on top of there. So then now you've got four inches of mulch in bags for insulation. And, and then when the winter's over, then I just use the mulch for cages.

So it's kind of like, you know, it's a cheap, it was a cheap solution and it's really easy to do. And, uh, so yeah, it's, it's a, it's basically the same thing that a lot of people do with hay, but I can't use hay because I'm allergic to it. So, um, so I had to find another way and that was what I came up with. Yeah. I remember a conversation I had with, uh, Bert Langworth back in you know the early 90s or late 90s somewhere around there and we were talking about um keeping stuff outdoors and you know that was his thing yeah keep everything outside and find species that will work with your environment and i'm like well i'm in northern utah you know there's not much that will do well

oh no you can keep this and this and this. Rattled off this list of all these species that could do well. And there's actually somebody, I've heard of a couple people doing this in Utah with Russian tortoises that they'll just kind of dig an area under a big hay bale or something. And they'll just let the tortoises overwinter under there, cover it with a tarp and they're good to go, you know, and then they'll find baby tortoises crawling around in their yard or in their enclosure, you know, in the summertime. So, you know, you can make it work with, with different species. You just have to kind of know their natural history and things. Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. That seemed like, you know, like the kind of the best of both worlds where you could just let them do their thing and

in the natural environment and find the babies at certain points. And is that kind of the best of both worlds where you could just let them do their thing and in the natural environment and find the babies at certain points and is that kind of the idea behind like the the chameleon populations that are in florida that they just kind of stick to one area and they don't really radiate from there they seem to be but the problem with them is that uh commercial collectors figured out where the populations were and then they started creating their own honey holes. So they would go and they would catch them in one location and then they would take and seed other locations. So they spread them all over the state really quickly. So, yeah.

And I think that was possibly becoming a problem with the tagus as well. So, so yeah, I, I mean, people just fuck everything up, man. I swear to God. I mean, but see all that stuff, you don't hear about that in the news. What you hear about is, you know, irresponsible pet owners are letting shit go. That's not at all what the case what's the case here in none of the case none of the instances were can be attributed to that they all have they were all a handful of irresponsible commercial entities that engaged

in some behavior that you know came back to bite us in the ass. The chameleons got here by a fucking cricket farm owner who liked them and turned them loose on his property. And then people that would come to buy the crickets realized that there were veil chameleons there and started catching them. And they told other people and eventually commercial collectors started going there. And then they were like, Oh shit. Well, I can, you know, I can take these and put them near where i live and so because they were catching them you know they were paying 150

dollars a piece for them they weren't going to go out there and dump them but when they could just go and catch them and move them and it requires a lot of of simultaneous introductions to actually get us colony started it just doesn't the, the idea that us, that some pets did this, it's very, it's almost astronomically improbable. But I mean, we all know down here the real story because we know these people who did this. They were, it's not like it was very hidden back in the day. It was just like, you know, hell, I used to go to that cricket farm myself to buy stuff.

And I would, when I, I was looking for bales when I was there, I never saw any, I saw some dead ones on the road, but I mean, everybody knew and, uh, but there's nothing you can do about it. I mean, the genie was out of the bottle 30 years ago 40 years ago that's the hard thing is trying to make these laws to to try to fix these issues after the the problem and that's it but that's then that's the whole point is it's yeah it's exactly we we can't you can't go backwards on it but the best you could do is address it. We're addressing the problem, legislation to address the problem.

Honestly, I even have to question if it's actually really an issue because humans have terraformed every inch of this state. There is no natural anything anymore yeah this state is extremely heavily populated and there are not everyone has yards are full of non-native plants i mean i live in one of the more natural parts of florida you know that's that there's not really a lot of the spot that i live like my five acres is not it's not planted with like all these non-native trees. Right. But it's still full of non-native shit that, that, that is here. Like there's, there's all sorts of stuff here, all sorts of weeds that aren't that are from the West Indies and all this stuff that.

Yeah. So, well, and I mean, even if they stopped, even if they stopped a global pet trade or transportation of fauna, there's still global trade happening and animals get on ships or, you know. I mean, they find their ways in food shipments and like it doesn't, you know, humans are the impact, right? And humans are everywhere and we're going, you know, it's just like, it's just like trying to stop a virus, uh, you know, in a global, uh, exchange of, of people. Like it's just never going to happen. It seems really insane too, to say, Oh, we need to control this Tegu problem when there's feral cats everywhere

literally yeah they're arguably much more damaging than any lizard is going to be just because they're mammals and they need a lot more to eat so yeah but they'll never touch that because then they would get beat to death by the cat ladies yep so that'll never happen strong strong cat right no one there's lab there's been plenty of vampires that were afraid of the moms they will bring your shit to the ground if you fuck with their family

or their pets you know oh yeah so you know I don't know man well I guess yeah maybe that's the kind of the wrap up messages. If you're going to do this outside, be responsible. Don't, don't be an idiot. Don't be, you know, letting your stuff out or, or having, you know,

crappy cages that they can escape from. Yeah. If they do go catch them, go find them, you know? Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, I mean, there's a lot of benefits to it it's it's if you can if you can overcome all the hurdles and you have some you know i mean i have a lot of accumulated knowledge of my environment because i've lived here my whole life i i collect i was a commercial reptile collector for almost 30 years when i lived in miami you know i i specialized in non-native species. I was the guy that supplied all those, you know, Cuban anoles and crested anoles to the pet trade and iguanas and all that. That's what I did.

So, you know, and I learned a lot about botany that way. And I learned a lot about, you know, and i learned a lot about you know you know the what kind of habitats these things need and um and i've applied all that so i bet you're a phenomenal herper because of that too you can go out and field herp like yeah nobody's if you guys ever get down here man i'll definitely take a week out of my schedule and we'll go do some. I'd be down. That'd be awesome. Just anytime, man.

I'm good. Cool. Okay. What's the, what's the best like month or, you know, the year to come, come down for kind of the biggest bang for your buck, I guess.

Spring and fall are good, but I mean, it depends on what you want to see. If you want to see a lot of like, you know, lizards and invasive shit, you know, that kind of stuff.

Anytime from now till October is good good like all summer okay i can that's my you know i know where to find lots of caimans you know i know where the pythons are the all like tons of different lizard species florida king snakes corn snakes all that stuff so I've got a yellow rat snake spot that Everglades rat snake spot that sometimes will produce 30 animals in an hour like it's this

island of cypress trees in the middle of a massive sugar cane field and it's the only place they can really live and it's fucking loaded with them it's crazy that would be cool just to see that would be cool yeah yeah that would be awesome all right well let's yeah we'll have to yeah i'm game on man road yeah i'm game on cool man well yeah again i mean i just learned so much from these conversations from

you i really love it coming on it's fantastic i appreciate it guys it's fun so yeah yeah it is asking the knowledge here so i was a little grumpy tonight on that subject i apologize it just no no no it's good to be said too i mean yeah that's a part of the part of the discussion right you know if you're going to keep stuff outdoors you better do it responsibly or you're it's good to be said too. I mean, yeah, I, part of the, part of the discussion, right. You know, if you're going to keep stuff outdoors, you better do it responsibly or you're going to ruin it for the rest of us. Yeah. To say I'm a little salty about that is an understatement. Yeah. Fair, fair enough. Fair enough. Understandably. So yeah. All right. Well, yeah. thanks again for coming on and thanks uh to everybody for listening and hope i'm sure everybody got something out of this discussion it's really

really a good one so when i catch the lemur i'll post it on facebook yeah yeah that's what i'm talking about look at this shit that's crazy shit. Crazy shit, man. All right. Well, thanks to Moralia Python Radio Network for hosting our podcast and check out all their stuff. They got a lot of good content, some good stuff recently. So, yeah, I don't know. Anything else to say, Chuck? Are we good here?

We're good, man. All right. All right. Well, Justin, Ron, and the Schmidt and Turn are out. Wait. Schmidt and Turn? Schmidt and Turn. Yeah.

It's like an intern, only it complains a lot. A Schmidt and Turn. That's good, man. See you later. We'll be right back. Thank you. you