One of the obvious, but unexpected side effects of a reptile party is that the birthday child wants a pet reptile.Nowadays reptiles are bred in large numbers for the pet trade and sold in pet shops in all Australian states.
In many respects domestic snakes and lizards are little different to dogs or cats. Same applies for less common pets such as frogs, crocodiles and turtles.
If you’ve been at a reptile show and seen reptiles and asked yourself how the handlers got them so tame, you may be in for a shock to learn that most reptiles are naturally tame.
The killing machine snakes and lizards are figments of people’s imaginations and the crude marketing of so-called TV documentaries that are often nothing more than misleadingly dangerous entertainment. The snakes trying to bite people on TV are invariably grossly mistreated and this biting response is merely the ultimate manifestation of it.
In the real world, short of attacking and injuring a reptile, they just refuse to bite!
One exception of course is when they feed. Snakes in particular get a feeding frenzy response and may bite at anything within range, including the side of its cage.
In fact there are many examples of snakes even trying to eat themselves!
The idea that people can keep reptiles as pets in Australia is relatively recent.
In fact for more than 20 years, most Australians were denied the right to keep reptiles and frogs as pets.
At the behest of government-run zoos trying to prop up their ailing business model, their associated wildlife departments banned all private ownership of reptiles and frogs.
This was in order to give their businesses a monopoly on the keeping of these animals. The result was that if people wanted to see a snake or lizard on a day out, the only place they could do this was at a government-run zoo.
In 1993 the snake man Raymond Hoser published the best-selling book Smuggled: The Underground Trade in Australia’s Wildlife which exposed the entire racket associated with the ban on reptiles as pets. The book detailed how school kids were getting jailed for merely rescuing reptiles found injured on roads, or the back yard, and cases of bothed armed raids that let to the killings of innocent people.
As a result of the publication of Smuggled and a sequel, Smuggled-2 in 1996, the laws relating to reptiles and frogs were re-written in all Australian states to allow for the first time in decades the right of private people to keep reptiles as pets.
Once people started keeping them, they also started to breed them, using methods first pioneered by Snakeman Raymond Hoser as detailed in numerous scientific papers and his best-selling book Australian Reptiles and Frogs that was published way back in 1989 and has been an icon text ever since.
Hoser was first to breed the rare Ant-hill Python and numerous other species, which are now bred worldwide and readily available within the legal pet trade.
So if your child enjoys his reptile birthday party and wants a snake as a pet, you can thank Raymond Hoser for the fact that he is now legally allowed to do so.
The publisher of Hoser’s ground-breaking books Australian Reptiles and Frogs, published in 1989, Endangered Animals of Australia published in 1991 and Smuggled: The Underground Trade in Australia’s Wildlife, published in 1993 was Charles Pierson. He has since been honoured with a genus of Australian snake named in his honour.
The Green Tree Snakes, formerly placed in the genus Dendrelaphis Boulenger, 1890, were transferred to Charlespiersonserpens Hoser, 2012 when it became clear that the former genus applied to significantly different Indian taxa and that prior to 2012, the Australian species did not have a valid genus to be placed in.
Significant is that Green Tree Snakes are both common in Eastern and Northern Australia and also a popular pet. It is fitting that a species and genus carry a name in honour of a man who did so much to make the dream of legal ownership of reptiles become a reality.
One of the ironies is that Charles Pierson himself, while a conservationist, does not keep animals himself and never has. He also comes from New Zealand, a country most famous for the fact it does not even have snakes!