Hi Wickens, I plan on getting a Carpet Python but enclosures are so expensive. Where do you get you’re enclosures from? And how big of an enclosure does a Carpet Python need?
When I was a child in the sixties, there were caimans in our local pet shops. Unfortunately, people would release them into the water hazards on the golf courses when they got tired of them.
@@b_bogg One of the oddball shops with a pet section in the back still sells them and other things that aren't that good pets...at least they don't have the chimp in there anymore, but the little monkeys they've got in there aren't a better thing either. Only reason that I've gone in there was due to the fact that it's part of a larger collection of stores, and part of their costume store is in the same space and I have access to a larger vehicle and a friend tied to a semi-local theater group which occasionally needs things picked up. When I was little, I used to think it was some of the coolest things and wanted some of the animals...and I did have a friend who had at least 3 alligators as pets. 2 of them were rescues, but considering his family, it's not that strange since they were exotic and large animal vets.
@@Terreos But aren't they warm-weather animals? Releasing them like that, they'd freeze in winter. Though... I guess, maybe that's better than having them become invasive...
In the 70s I wanted to take a room in the basement, cover the floor with concrete in which I'd sculpt a pond, get an alligator to live in the pond, add some branches and plants and have an iguana or two. I even sketched out plans and showed my parents. Somehow, the next day, it became my sister's new bedroom.
In the 50s, my grandpa sent a baby aligator home in the mail from Texas or Louisiana. Hopefully it was a caiman, and not actually an alligator, my dad isn't sure. It lived with 3 bullfrogs in their kitchen in a homemade wooden cage. It survived for many years and was a neighborhood attraction, but I doubt it was a good life.
When I was in grammar school in the Sixties, there was a place called the Louisiana Biological Center. You could send them a dollar and they'd send you four chameleons (or what us reptile geeks would recognize as green anoles). They would come by postal mail in a crushed beer can filled with dried grass.
I just googled and read the ad from a boy scout magazine "a boys life" it said "4 color changing chameleons $1.50 send additional $0.25 for a complete list of snake and other reptile list" that magazine had me send in $1 for a bowie knife and when it came it was like a inch long.
I was around in the 60s though born in 1960 they were my “single-digit” years. Having a brother nearly ten years my senior who was into herps was my intro to the hobby at an early age. I do remember seeing all these reptiles in local pet shops but the Asian Box Turtles stand out most in my memory. We had tons of Eastern BT present at my family’s summer house property on Eastern Long Island and I remember researching box turtles at a very early age. Asian Boxies require a much more aquatic environment than our US species and that’s why they -especially the Flower Shell were deemed somewhat difficult to maintain as captives. Keenan Harkin (of “Kamp Keenan”) has a collection of Asian Boxies which he acquired from a seizure in NYC’s Chinatown during the early 2000s. He also did a whole video about a breeding facility which is dedicated exclusively to breeding box turtles. I believe it’s in either Georgia or S. Carolina and the number of species they have, especially Asian is amazing. I don’t think they sell to the public as their focus is reintroduction to their native ranges but anyone interested should check out Kenan’s vid, they give their contact info at the end.
@@willarcher2353 if current legislation pushes get their way, future generations will say the same thing of you about seeing boas, milk snakes, dart frogs, and all but the most mainstream of exotics in pet stores. I'm of the opinion that having a captive population and a monetary incentive to breed the species is a good thing, and that it isn't inherently wrong to want to keep and enjoy exotics in a quality habitat at home, but many who are outside the hobby disagree.
I would like to say that Floyd did an amazing job at being an endangered box turtle. You couldn’t even tell the difference in 99% of the shots! Go Floyd!
15 years ago, I received a Cuora Picturata (Southern Vietnamese box turtle), absolutely free. It was a business associate of my Fathers that no longer wanted it. That same C. Picturata I kept until just last year, he is now in a breeding program for the species. He’s now paired up with Females, Hopefully he can reproduce 🙏🏻
My mom's best friend growing up, maybe in the '30's or '40's, had a pet alligator that came in a cigar box. It lived under the family sofa, and bit people who sat on the sofa. It "disappeared" when she went to college. I'm sure it lived a terrible life.
I was born in 1959 and lived in NY until I was 30. When I was a kid in the 60's and 70's, every pet store had Asian box turtles, caimans, green anoles, green iguanas, fire belly newts, fire belly toads, eastern newts, Greek tortoises, red eared sliders, curly tail lizards, boa constrictors, retics, and Burmese pythons. I realize now the amount of suffering most of these creatures suffered. Not only was there a lack of information, but if they lived long enough, many of these animals got too big to keep successfully. I'm living in Florida and I'm shocked to see so many of these creatures naturalized in Florida and Hawaii. They are here to stay, many causing a huge problem.
I really love this type of series, its interesting to see reptiles of the past. So curious to see more! Also thank you for your videos, because of you and Clint I got a pink tongue skink, your videos pushed me to look outside of the normal pets.
I grew up in the '60s. My first reptile was a baby watersnake. I also had 3 baby red eared sliders. I remember seeing anoles, garter and ribbon snakes. There were green iguanas, chuckwallas , dessert iguanas , and. SMOOTH GREEN SNAKES! Can't find those anymore. No "morphs" or captive bred anything. No real info. Had to go to natural science books for what little info they had.
I have spent a while being confused why green snakes don't seem to be common in the reptile hobby. Smooth and rough green snakes look kind of tropical because they're green but they come from right here in the US/Canada! And I imagine there could be some pretty cool morphs since people would be working with something other than the standard black or brown colors that most North American colubrids are. Idk though. I'm no expert so maybe there's some group of people out there who keep them.
@@victornoname7269 I wonder that too, apparently some people do keep green snakes but not many. I wanted one because they seemed easy to care for to be but I didn't get far until I found they weren't legal to keep in my state because they are native.
In the 60s my great grandma had alligators and chameleons in her row house in Chicago. Legend has it the gators went to Shedd Aquarium. I don’t know what kind of chameleons they were.
Doing a video where you read through and comment on really old reptile care guides (maybe '50s and '60s) could be funny, interesting and, I imagine, wince inducing.
It blows my mind that people would be insane enough to keep salties as pets. Salties get like 20 feet long and are the heaviest crocodile in the world.
When I was a kid, my grandmother got me a lizard. This was at Sears. My dad and I went back to find out what they ate. Only to find out it was an alligator. Meantime my little sister was crying because she did not get a pet. So we bought her goldfish.
I would definitely love a care guide on monkey tail skinks! The fact that they eat mainly veggies and can eat pothos seems super unique and given how easy to grow pothos are it can be pretty easy to have a least a constant food source plus I can see people planting veggies that they eat too. Many people are not the biggest fans of live insects so having a reptile that doesn’t eat them is super unique!
Love your videos so much lol, in fact your videos are what inspired me to get another reptile after my leopard gecko who I had for 4 years died because of a digestive issue. And I’m going to get a blue tongue Irwin really made me fall in love with them lol
i found out that tortoise imports to uk were banned in the 80's, we had two couples in our neibourhood that had some, they allowed to roam thier gardens in the summer, one was really big. I remember sitting on the wall of one of these gardens and chin scratching one of these tortoises, it was twenty somthing i was tiney and didnt understand people being that old let alone a pet. but one summer i must have been 6 as i was at school and walked past on my way from school each day, they had been stolen, all five of these awsome animals had vanished close together, one couples pets then the other. looking back, they were suddenly worth lots more money. i still look for them whenever i walk past those houses
Earlier and later decades would be interesting. It would be cool to know what sort of reptile pets, if any, royalty or famous people had back in the day as well. Like maybe Lincoln had a turtle or something lol. I’d be down for a video about it. ☺️
John Quincy Adam's had a crocodile or alligator as a presidential pet, it stayed in a bathroom. George Washington had the most breeds of dogs ever to be apart of the Whitehouse, his female Dalmatian was one of his favorites, while also officially breeding the American fox hound the first dog of the United States. Theodore Roosevelt is tied for having the animals and most variety from reptiles, to guinea pigs, to a bear, and more. He had a guinea pig named Bob Evens which always makes me laugh. The history of pets of the Whitehouse is fun read!
Those Elephant Ear Chameleons would be awesome to have back in the hobby. Madagascar has closed their borders in the past which could explain why they became unable. Plus larger chameleon species are not right for everyone. Interesting list from a guy born in the 60's...lol🤔👴🤣
I have 2 Elephant Ear Chameleons. One I got from a breeder and the other is one I hatched myself from a wild caught female I had. He's also overstating how large they are. I would consider them a medium sized chameleon. They're smaller than Pather Chameleons.
I come from generations of animal and reptile keepers. My mother worked in an exotic pet shop in the 60's, as a teen. She Grew up with a 6 foot iguana that she walked like a dog, on a leash: in old Los Angeles, CA. My grandparents would fly large reptiles home to California, from Central America: in carryon luggage in the 60's.
In the 60s I lived in Newfoundland. It may sound surprising, but prizes in gumball machines included miniature jack knives and isopods! I always hoped for the isopods. Times have changed. I still like a good isopod!
I recently came across the story of the 1953 cobra scare in Springfield, Missouri. The story is insane and revolves around a pet store owner that carried an assortment of crazy exotics including cobras, monkeys, and even the odd penguin. There are a number of articles on it, but here's a link to a great video that really breaks the whole story down. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-PI-5fBzMHQo.html
When I was a kid in the 60's, the pet shops always had Horned Lizards sold by the name Horned Toads, and Native Green Anoles sold as American Chameleons these 2 Native species were found in all the pet stores, the Anoles fare better in captivity because they dont have the exclusive diet of the Horned Lizards and are more tolerant of differing temperatures and humidity
At least here in the US, Elephant Ear chameleons are still imported from Madagascar at least once a year. Although in probably much smaller numbers then they used to. From a lot of import lists I looked at from the 50s to the 70s was a lot of Lacerta species from Italy and parts of Europe.
In about the mid 1990's, Madagascar banned exports of all species of chameleon but 4 in the genus Furcifer and didn't start exporting other species until relatively recently, so for about 20 years, Elephant Ear chameleons weren't available.
I was a kid in the 60's and loved going to a pet shop as it was like a little zoo. I believe you're mistaken about the saltwater crocodiles as pets, more likely they were fresh water baby caimans from South America. I saved up money and bought two baby caimans about a foot long. Aside from pet stores you could mail order caimans. Horned lizards were also popular in the 1960's and again you can mail order them, which I did. The crocodiles imported were probably for zoos and for leather. Crocodile leather shoes, purses and wallets were very popular in the 1960's. Do a search for baby caimans as they're the pet store ones.
I am kind of curious about the 1940's. Seems like that is more or less when the exotic pet trade started to become more common as there wasn't a lot of keeping of exotic pets by the middle class before the great depression, and not a lot during the great depression too because obvious reasons. From what I can see though there were a lot of mammals being sold in the 1940s that you'd never see today, but doesn't seem like there was that much of a reptile trade.
I had a pair of Corucia in the 1990's and managed to get one baby, wish I had kept them seeing the prices...I gave them to someone to add to their collection!
Even in the 90s it was different. We used to have a Safari World where I lived that carried everything from crocodiles to king cobras. I fucking loved that place.
I don't go back to the 1960s, but I got my start in reptiles and amphibians in the late 1980s. One animal that was ubiquitous in pet shops at the time and was easy to keep in captivity was the eastern newt - a species native to eastern North America. These animals could be kept in a partially filled aquarium with land and water areas, with basic filtering and no temperature regulation. Strangely, by the late 1990s, they had disappeared from pet shops, though other types of newts from western North America and east Asia were readily available. I haven't looked recently, so I don't know if the eastern newt has since made a comeback. For anyone who is interested in newts, I would strongly recommend them. They are attractive animals, they are fun to watch, and they are easy to feed and not too picky about temperature.
Is it just me, or is Diamond super duper wiggly in this video? Props to Adam for not missing a beat while catching climbing a beardie! Lol like a lizard version of my eight-month-old 😂
I seen a few elephant ear chameleons captive bred here in the uk lately but dont normally tho there all private breeds tho and seen a few captive bred solaman skinks but very expensive
I saw a pair of monkey tail skinks at a petco in Morgantown WV. They were very expensive but I didn't realize just how rare they were until after they were already gone.
@@WickensWickedReptiles yeah I imagine that this isn't typical for chain petstores. If I remember correctly I think they were about $3,000 for the pair. Appreciate the videos , keep up the great job.
I've got a care guide book on chameleons printed in the 1970s. And my vote is 1970s next. Eighties was Green Iguanas, Red Tailed Boas and lots of those really small turtles.
Its pretty cool to see how trends in pets have changed, but the shorthand version for why you dont see these animals outside of zoo enclosures anymore is: rareness, impracticality or it's prescribed as medicine/on the menu...
I love these episodes.We still get elephant ear chameleons in at the importer that I work at.The Philadelphia price list was probably from Henry Molt.Check out the book Stolen World it’s all about the old importers and smugglers
Semi-related, but I recently watched an old Italian horror thriller (iirc it was Lizard In A Woman’s Skin from 1971) and a recurring theme is the killer stealing and keeping a pair of tokay geckos, and I remember thinking “people kept tokays in the 70s?!” It was fun to see that the tokays in that movie also had a LOT of attitude as well, so I guess some things don’t change 😂
Curious, did you convert the prices when looking at the lists? There's a huge difference between $50 in the 1960s and $50 now. I didn't realize how much until we recently came across my grandpa's old tax documents from 1963 where he earned $5,000 for the whole year which basically translates to $50,000 today. If you didn't do that already it might put some of the prices into perspective 😁
If a species lives in only one tiny island, there wont be any left if you take them all away. It seems people really didnt learn that just from eating dodos. Thanks. Loved a video about times when no one knew anything. I hope theres more than these 5.
Other things that used to pet common in pet stores you never see any more :Myna birds used to be sold all over the place, now you can't find them any more and monkeys. While monkeys were never common household pets prior to the 70s most decent sized American cities had pet shops you could buy them at. What is the reason for these changes?
There used to be a little pet store attached to Eaton's at the Eaton Center in Toronto, that had caimans for sale in the early to mid 90s. The guy working there was expressing he just keeps his in a kiddie pool in his living room. I was a kid then and thought that was fascinating and cool, but looking back at it now, I feel so bad for those gators and am glad they're not a thing in the pet trade anymore.
This doesn't have to do with the 60s, but back in the early 80s, when I was in junior high, my friend's older brother had a pet Alligator in his basement. It was about four feet long and he kept it corralled with those fences they used to make for toddlers. He kept it there for a couple years before his family moved and he sold it.
the very beginnings of private reptile keeping would be interesting. i mean when it started that “regular” ppl had reptiles, not just very rich, eccentric people
My dad had a pet caiman when he was a kid in Phx Arizona. “Your grandpa forgot to fill the kiddy pool when I had to go to baseball practice- when I got back you pick him up by his tail and he was stiff as a board” ☹️
Maybe we need to bring Elephant Ear Chams back into the trade. See what happened to the popularity. I'd LOVE a monkey-tailed skink some day. Definitely would love a video to see more of Bruce. Also, lol. I know a guy who has a basement gator. Not a croc. A gator.
I grew up on a Bayou, so it's wild to me that people were putting gators/crocodiles in their basements. They were in my backyard. My house had stilts and we weren't allowed to play past a certain point. Move to a bayou if you want a pet gator ✨️ duh.
I have some short stories in anthologies that are on audible. I would have loved to have read the books, but no one asked me to. Had I known that was something listeners wanted, I would totally have suggested it. I think it would be so cool to have a short story anthology on audible where each author in the anthology read their own story. Then you get it read in the proper inflection that the author had intended! Anyway, if anyone is interested in the 2 books I'm in, they're called Mosaics, a collection of independant woman and Sha'daa Inked.
Ok, I was born in 1969, I worked in a few pet stores in the '80s and 90s. I saw Indonesian Box Turtles and they were a little below $100 each. I saw Monkey Tailed Skinks in pet shops and they were a few hundred. I almost bought them, but I was in an apartment and wanted a perfect set up for them but knew I never could supply it to them
I worked as a teen in the early 80s in a suburban Chicago pet store. I remember that we'd get pond turtles (sliders, maps, diamondbacks, etc) but they all had to be bigger than 4" because of the baby turtle salmonella scare in 60s and 70s. We also carried Baby RT boas, and yellow Rat Snakes, as well as Rainbow boas. Lizards apart from Anoles and baby Iguanas, I remember were stargazers and plated lizard. We also has Retics and Burmese occasionally. Oh, and ball pythons, no morphs.
Calumma brevicorne gets still imported from time to time especially to the US. They have a annual quota for export. The other elephant ear chameleon is Trioceros melleri which is much rarer these days since Tanzania closed exports
Please do a care guide on Solomon Island Skinks! I’ve been thinking of getting one and would love to see a video care guide with updated care info on them!!
Love this! I was born in 1961. A lot of these species I grew up around,. Apu I have owned wait long ago. A lot of these I grew up around, via School, friends, and a friend's father who had an exotic and wild animal rescue
