Griswold snake breeder granted permit to continue his work

Griswold, Conn. —

After months of questions, lawyers and paperwork, Randy LaPorte finally got the permit Monday to legitimize his Jewett City snake breeding business.

Planning and Zoning Commission members voted Monday to support LaPorte’s application for a home business permit for the snakes he breeds and sells in the basement of his East Main Street home. They granted him a three-year permit, the maximum allowable.

After the decision came down, LaPorte said it was support he had from snake hobbyists and professionals from all over the region that made the difference. Representatives from reptile organizations from all over New England packed the meeting to support LaPorte and offer information about the nonpoisonous snakes — ball pythons and red-tail boas — LaPorte works with.

“I’m glad to see, with education, that the town learned about it,” he said. “They did the right thing and, with education, overcame their fear factor.”

LaPorte had been breeding snakes and raising mice to feed them with for seven years, starting when he got his son his first ball python. Seeing all the colors and patterns possible reminded him of his foray into genetics as a child, breeding guppies to create new colors and patterns on the fish, he told the commission.

His attorney, Stuart Norman Jr., told the commission that, like many hobbies, it became too expensive to sustain itself on its own, so LaPorte began selling some of his snakes to keep it going. Soon, it became a business.

A complaint about odor filed anonymously in March led to a cease-and-desist order from the town building department, because LaPorte lacked a permit to do business out of his home. The order forced him to stop selling the snakes, but not to get rid of them.

Many of the commission’s questions Monday focused on contingency plans and consequences if the snakes were to escape.

“You’d be looking at some very sick snakes,” said Andrew Sollecito, the head of the reptile collection and education programs at the Lupa Zoo in Ludlow, Mass. The snakes, he said, require temperatures and humidity levels that are the equivalent of a muggy July day and wouldn’t last much longer than a week or two outside of the climate-controlled environment in LaPorte’s basement.

Both commissioners and the reptile experts in attendance who had seen LaPorte’s operation praised him for the clean and odor-free facility

Kurt Schatzl of the New England Herpetological Society, based in Massachusetts, told the commission that he had seen few breeding facilities as clean as LaPorte’s, calling both the snake and rodent areas “immaculate.”

Commissioner Erik Kudlis said he, too, was impressed.

“I had envisioned something out of ‘Indiana Jones,’ with 250 snakes waiting to pounce on you, but I didn’t see that at all,” he said. “I don’t see where it’s a nuisance. There are no complaining neighbors, no odors, no threats to the neighborhood. I’d be more concerned if he had two pit bulls for pets.”
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