1st pet reptile?

[reptastic]

i was hoping to get a discussion started on what was everyone's first pet reptile and what made tham decide to get in to this hobby! ill start:

my first pet reptile was a little green anole i got when i was in the eighth grade(cant remember his name) i had him for only a few months before he passed. i used to listen to the guy in the petshop when he gave me advice on reptile care and lets just say for the most part it was wrong. i was never informed of uvb or vit. d3 nor calcium. while i admit i should have done more research i was only 14 and didnt know much about the internet. i didnt really keep reptiles then mostly other pets like hamsters and parrots i did have a female and 2 male iguanas for about 6 years. about 8years ago i started slowly getting into reptiles after reading moreabout them on the net. then i started my first reptile collection which incuded 2 male iguanas, 1 black iguana, a bearded dragon, a box turtle, a savannah monitor and a leopard gecko. i was forced too rehome all of them then a few years later i started another collection with a columbian tegu, a baby iggy, a veiled chameleon, a bearded dragon, a dumpy tree frog, a vivarium with 6 anoles, and 2 paddle tail newts but after a break in i lost most of my collection. it took 2 years before i got back into reptiles now i have a nice collection and wouldnt trade em for anything!

 

[Jefroka]

My first reptile was a green grass snake. I was around eight years old. This was before internet existed, lol!


...Jefroka

 

[isdrake]

I started pretty late at age 22-23. I have always though reptiles and lizards in general was good looking (I'm really intro dragons and dinosaurs) but I haven't wanted any by my own because I though they where boring as pets (since you should just leave them alone like fish).

"My" first reptile was two leopard geckos. It wasn't planned. They belonged to my boyfriends little brother. Sadly their mother pasted away in cancer and no one wanted to take care of them. So we took them in.

I must admit these guys are really boring, haha. But they opened my eyes for reptiles. Soon we got a bearded dragon which was a lot more fun. And a year after that we got our two Tegus.

I want to add that I wouldn't progress this fast and getting large Tegus this soon (two years after my first reptiles) if it wasn't for my boyfriend. He have had TONS of reptiles and are experienced. But I think I'm doing pretty good myself.

 

[Toby_H]

My first reptile was a garter snake...

My father and I would catch them locally when I was a kid. I kept a few and we would sell others to a couple of different pet stores for $1 each. I used this "income" to finance the early days of my animal addiction...

Just to mention, I wouldn't do this again with what I know/think now. Now I do not agree with the idea of removing animals from the wild to keep as pets except to use as initial breeding stock for captive bred programs. That's just what I think......


I also made my share of mistakes and bad decisions in those days. I already had my first reptile when the Comodor 64 was the cutting edge of home computers. Needsless to say my information came from books, my local pet shop employees and my father... Having the internet to educate ourselves with makes things so much easier........

 

[Marlene]

My first pet reptile was, and still is, my alligator lizard, Alli! I caught her when I was 8 or 9 years old out in my back yard. I had caught many lizards and snakes before that, but I always released them after wards. When I caught Alli I was told I could only keep her for the weekend and had to release her when I got back from the sleep over that I was going to. When I came back, my parents had bought me a big ol' plastic cage for her, they then said I could only keep her for a week, and, well, a week has turned into about ten or eleven years! I then started rescuing reptiles a few years later and my collection really started to grow!

 

[rmzsuzuki89]

My first reptiles were a whole bunch of Cuban anoles, the lizards in your back yard lol. I kept probably 15 of them for quite a while actually. This was when I was like 12 lol. Then I got a bearded dragon and had him for years. Then, when I was around 15, we found a baby ball python in our garage. We found out who it belonged to and took it back to him. But he saw that I liked it, so he said I could keep it. My mom got rid of it about a year later.

Now I'm back at it again, with my two beardies, Ganymede and Callisto. I've had them for a few months now. I will soon be the owner of a VarnYard B/W tegu hatchling.

 

[sclevenger08]

Well I guess the question is what do I really consider my first reptile. I guess when I was like 8ish, I fell in love with this little green Iguana. I begged and begged until my grandma gave in. Needless to say, I didn't keep it, my sweet little Iggy became to much for me.

Knowing what I know now about how to properly take care of these wonderful animals makes me feel horriable. :-(. But what can I say, I was only a kid with parents who didn't know how to say no.

However, as far as the first reptile to get me started into these critters was a 3 week old Chinese Water Dragon. I named her Wasabi and I just totally fell in love and she introduced to me to the thought that reptiles are amazing and I honestly believe they have feelings. lol.

 

[TanMan57]

My first lizard was a wild caught blue belly that I had for a year and then let go but the lizard stuck around on my roof top for about three more years. I was about 7.

 

[Charmander]

My first reptile was a red eared slider my dad got me when I was about 9 I had him for a summer and then my mom made him let it go.

then about a year and a half ago I got myself a New Guinea Frilled Dragon named Odysseus which started it all.

Next I got a Ball Python named Joan Rivers who I got for free then wound up giving to one of my friends a few months later.
Then I got my B&W Tegu Lilo
followed by a Red Tegu Pumba from Bobby and finally a Red Tail Boa

 

[slideaboot]

When I was seven years old I talked my invalid grandmother (whom I was living alone with at the time in a studio apartment) into purchasing a 13 foot burmese python for me. We named her Cutey Pants. It was the cutest thing I'd ever seen!!! We couldn't afford a cage so it just free-roamed (just like us!) around the apartment. We couldn't afford food for it either, so we just left the window open with a bowl of cat food on the window-sill (she was a FAT python, LOL!!!). As you can imagine, we didn't have any real heat source for it, so grandma and I would cuddle up with CP (I called her "CP" because I thought it was EVEN CUTER!!!) and fall asleep for hours. CP really seemed to love this.

We lived like this for years (ah! the good ol' days!).

Nah...

It was an anole that my mom's (then) boyfriend bought for me so he could look like the nice guy in my mom's eyes. We kept it in a giant mayo jar and it died a couple months later.

 

[Marlene]

lol, love the burm story!

 

[sclevenger08]

haha, that burm story was cute<3

 

[reptastic]

lmbo that burm story is hilarious

 

[nemo66]

well my father was into reptiles just as much as i am and my first memory actually is him feeding a chicken to the 13 ft burm. pretty much been around them my whole life he had red tails, balls, burms and lots of others. the first snake i got to call my own was a black Mexican king snake. her name was echo.

 

[rrcoolj]

My gosh where too start! I think my first reptile was a painted turtle I kept in a little 10 gallon aquarium. I loved this turtle to death and I woud clean his tank all the time and give him baths. I would even take him on walks outside. But one day when I thaught he was dead he was actually hibernating! We set him in the backyard. Come spring time he was gone. I like to think he made it to the pond across the street .

Since then I have kept grass lizards, anoles, fire bellied toads, green tree frogs, hermit crabs, chinese water dragons, iguanas, emerlad swift, bearded dragons, ball python, fire bellied newts, oregon newts, and that's all I can remeber right now. I loved all of them but didn't know how to properly take care alot of them so they died early.

I now have 2 leos and a black and white tegu. Im hoping to get a crested gecko soon.

 

[White_Lotus]

i just love story sharing time xD wells my first reptile pet wasnt really mine per say but i saw to it that it at least had 1 meal a day and some water. I lived in Las Vegas with me mum and a desert tortoise would frequent the backyard so i would come out and feed it collard greens, carrots, home grown cacti, and other shrubs from my grandmums "garden" aka weed patch with shrubbery. and i would gently spray its mouth region with water from a mister...but one day it never came back for its daily carrot slices =( after that i started to help take care of my older cousin burms, retics, and is argus then he went to jail we sold all of the animals off and years later i bought my first savannah monitor died to severe infestation of parasites, a month later i bought my first argentine black and white tegu name it Akira and now i'm upto all the animals in the list and i may be able to add one more this weekend xD