PRESS OF ATLANTIC CITY (New Jersey) 29 April 08 Reptiles as pets practical at best
On a family hike around Higbee Beach Wildlife Management Area in Lower Township last week, my son spotted a 7-inch lizard on a tree and excitedly pointed it out.
Its brilliant blue throat and smooth, gray-brown body meant it was a male eastern fence lizard. It circled the tree to keep away, but kept peeking around to keep an eye on us.
As it happens, this 10-year-old has been seeking approval to get a pet lizard for a few weeks. He redoubled his efforts after seeing the fence lizard.
It would be hard to argue with him if I weren't so good at these debates.
The past decade, the number of U.S. households with reptile pets has nearly doubled to 4.8 million.
Lizards and snakes are better suited in some ways to our busier, more urbanized lives. They don't need a yard or human help to exercise, and they need less feeding and cleaning maintenace than mammals.
I'm grateful that he merely wants a green anole - a lizard native to Florida that measures about 5 inches in length - since our new found fondness for reptiles is causing ecological problems. Some of us like to import big, scary reptiles for pets, and then allow them to get loose and become invasive pests here.
Perhaps you've heard that pythons and monitor lizards have gone feral in Florida. The snakes have sufficiently infested the Everglades to increase the threat to five endangered species there.
Happily for New Jersey, 15-foot pythons like warmth, and so their possible habitat, if they keep expanding their range, would end at Delaware across the bay. Unless something warms up the world - and how could that happen? - we're perfectly safe.
As I've said before - too many times, as far as the rest of the family is concerned - I strongly prefer that animals live in nature in their native habitats and not as pets, for their sake and ours.
Since society in general and my family in particular do not share this view, we currently have five pets: an indoor cat and four fish.
If you're going to have a pet, a fish has certain advantages, and the fact that it shares these with small lizards gives my son some hope of success.
Fish and lizards aren't smelly producers of allergens. They don't need to be taken for a walk, dragging you out to the bike path at all hours with a cleanup bag in hand. They don't make a mess of things in the house. Their food is cheap and they don't need much of it. They don't live long enough to burden parents after the children grow up. And their tanks don't need cleaning very often.
They have one downside. Fish and lizards are neither cuddly, cute nor very interactive (although like all pets, they have their methods of encouraging us to keep feeding them).
People who want to imagine a human-like relation with a pet don't find them satisfying. I'm content to imagine having human-like relations with other people.
So I'm OK with adding a lizard to the home menagerie. Now he can focus his lobbying on mom, who prefers warm-blooded pets.
But seeing that fence lizard at Higbee, with his throat blazing a blue welcome sign to females in his choice and well-protected territory, I couldn't help thinking again: This is how life should be.
Reptiles as pets practical at best