There is a look. You know the one. It happens the moment you pull a chameleon off a branch in front of someone who has never held a reptile. Their face does something involuntary — a flinch, a slow step back, sometimes an audible “ew.” And in that exact moment, reptile keeping pride does something interesting to you from the inside. Not embarrassment. Not the urge to explain yourself. Just a quiet, steady, almost unreasonable sense of ownership over something most people will never understand. A pride that does not need applause. It does not need agreement, validation, or even acknowledgment. It simply exists — calm and fully formed — in the space between their discomfort and your absolute certainty that what you are doing is exactly right.
Because what they are calling weird, I am calling mine.
The Discomfort of Others Is Not Your Problem
Let’s be honest about something most people won’t say out loud. A significant portion of human judgment is just unfamiliarity dressed up as disgust. It is not logic, it is not science, it is simply the brain encountering something outside its comfort zone and firing off an alarm it mistakes for a moral opinion.
Dr. Gordon Burghardt, a leading researcher in animal behavior and human-animal relationships, has argued for decades that the bonds humans form with non-traditional animals are just as psychologically real and emotionally complex as those formed with cats and dogs. The species is different. The connection is not.
So, when someone looks at me like I am performing a ritual rather than feeding my chameleon, I do not feel the need to defend the ritual. I feel the need to finish feeding my chameleon.
On Being the Wolf
This is not arrogance. It is a very specific kind of confidence that only comes from crossing bridges. Every time I have pushed past my own hesitation — the first time I held a reptile, the first time I reached into a tank with fish that could draw blood, the first time I let a chameleon walk across my face in front of strangers — I did not just learn something about the animal. I learned something about myself.
And what I learned is this: the people watching with wide eyes are not more normal than me. They are simply less curious. That is a fundamentally different thing.
What Reptile Keeping Teach You About People
Here is something that 23 years of keeping animals across multiple species has taught me. Animals do not perform. They do not pretend, flatter, or adjust their personality based on who is watching. A chameleon either trusts you or it does not. A turtle either swims toward you or it retreats. A bristlenose either eats from your hand or it does not. There is no social performance involved. There is no second-guessing the vibe.
Humans, on the other hand, spend enormous energy performing normalcy for each other.
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” This quote is about the universe. But I think about that line every single time I watch Cosmo change color in response to light, temperature, and mood — every single time I realize I am watching a biological system so ancient and so elegant that the only reasonable response is wonder.
The people calling that weird are the ones missing it entirely.
The History Is on My Side
Humans and reptiles share over 300 million years of coexistence on this planet. The dismissal of reptiles as unworthy of care or connection is a remarkably recent cultural invention — and a remarkably shallow one. Ancient Egyptians revered crocodiles. Indigenous cultures across the Americas, Africa, and Asia incorporated reptiles into their deepest spiritual frameworks. The Aztecs built their entire cosmological identity around the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl. The Romans kept moray eels in elaborate garden pools as symbols of wealth and sophistication.
The idea that reptiles are something to recoil from is not ancient wisdom. It is modern squeamishness. And it is a choice. A reversible one.
I gave this to my daughters deliberately and without apology. They now watch me with Cosmo without the slightest hesitation. They do not flinch and they do not step back. My girls simply observe, curious and calm — because in their world, this is not strange. This is just what life looks like.
The Real Divide
I want to be careful here, because this is not about superiority. People who do not keep reptiles are not lesser. People who are afraid of them are not broken. Fear is a legitimate biological response and I respect it completely.
But judgment is different from fear. Looking at someone and deciding they are strange for loving something you do not understand — that is a choice. And it is a choice that says more about the observer than the observed.
Research published in Anthrozoös, the peer-reviewed journal on human-animal interaction, has consistently found that people who form bonds with non-traditional companion animals tend to score higher on empathy measures and report stronger senses of personal identity. The correlation is not coincidental. When you learn to see value in something the world tells you to dismiss, you become better at questioning the world’s other instructions.
That is the bridge I keep crossing. And every time I cross it, I come out the other side knowing myself a little more clearly.
What Reptile Keeping Pride Feels Like!
It does not feel loud. That is the thing people get wrong about pride. Real pride — the kind that does not need an audience — is very quiet. It is the feeling of standing in front of Cosmo’s enclosure at 6 AM while everyone else is still asleep and knowing exactly what he needs before he shows discomfort. Watching Mike and Frida in the water and understanding their dynamic well enough to know when Frida is being territorial versus when she is just being Frida, which is honestly most of the time.
It is a Tuesday afternoon with your hands in a tank, doing something deeply unglamorous, and feeling completely, unreasonably at peace.
The weird ones are not the people handling reptiles in parking lots and talking to their turtles like old friends. The weird ones are the people who have never once looked at a living creature and thought, I want to understand you.
A Final Note for the Sheep
If you have read this far and you are one of the people who once looked at me sideways for what I do, I want you to know something genuinely, non-sarcastically. You can cross the bridge too. It is not guarded and it does not require credentials or courage or any prior experience with animals. It requires only one thing: the willingness to be uncomfortable for long enough to become curious.
The wolf does not explain itself. But it does leave the door open.
“The more I learn about people, the more I like my animals.” — often attributed to Mark Twain, though the sentiment belongs to every keeper who has ever smiled at the look on someone’s face while they watched them handle a reptile for the first time.
Sources
- University of Tennessee
https://psychology.utk.edu/people/gordon-burghardt/ - University of Tennessee – Animal Behavior Society
https://psychology.utk.edu/burghardt-honored-by-animal-behavior-society/ - Wikipedia – Sobek (Ancient Egyptian Crocodile God)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sobek - JSTOR Daily – Crocodiles in Ancient Egypt
https://daily.jstor.org/crocodiles-in-ancient-egypt/
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