Reptiles – Dr. Shaun Duke, Professional Nerd

Considering Exotic Animals and the Tiger King

On a whim, I began watching Netflix’s new documentary series, Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness, which apparently set out to be the Blackfish of the private big cat zoo world but quickly became something a bit more eccentric and “true crime’-ish. Just like the characters it follows: Joe Exotic (the Tiger King himself), Doc Antle, and “big cat rescue” lady, Carole Baskin. Part of the shift in tone from animal rights documentary to a true crime dive into the dark hole of the human soul appears to be the fact that Joe Exotic, a longtime enemy of Carole Baskin, was arrested and convicted last year for attempting a murder-by-hire on Baskin. Or maybe that was just the icing on the cake the directors realized they had baked after filming. I don’t know. I’m not really here to talk about that, though. Rather, I want to talk about my own perspective on this cast of characters and the many others like them in the exotic pet world. As many of you know, I am also an exotic pet owner and come from a family of them. By comparison to the cast of characters in Tiger King, however, we’re fairly innocuous varieties. I keep small snakes and lizards (three corn snakes, a bull snake, a spotted python, a Peruvian and a Colombian rainbow boa, and (now) 3 leopard geckos) while my mom and her delightful wife Kathy run a bird rescue — which results in their house being a haven for parrots. Our perspectives are fairly close: we both think that most bird species should not be kept as pets, especially certain breeds of parrots, but we also agree that many exotics can, with proper care, be wonderful additions in a family. In my case, I just really like reptiles, but I draw a pretty firm line over what I consider acceptable as a reptile keeper.

Snakes in SF/F/H (Or, Drumming Up Fear from Ignorance)

As someone who keeps reptiles and still occasionally searches for them in the wild, very few things annoy me more than the way genre films treat snakes. In fact, one of my biggest rants on Torture Cinema concerned the sea snake inaccuracies in Sphere (1998). To this day, I find it difficult to watch films which feature snakes of any kind because almost all of them get nearly everything wrong and most of them use snakes as plot devices for fear. There are a lot of problems with the way snakes are portrayed in SF/F/H, especially film. The biggest, however, can be summed up in these three points:

Five Faves: Snakes!

I’m a fan of snakes. Most of you already know this because I don’t exactly keep it secret. Snakes are just…cool. They don’t behave like other animals, come in a wide range of sizes and colors (and shapes, even if all snakes are tubular). And like a lot of snake people, I have my favorites. Some favorites are snakes I actually keep. Some favorites are snakes I will probably never keep. But they all have one thing in common: I think they are pretty darn awesome. With that in mind, here are my five favorite snake species!

A Gallery of Puerto Rican Lizards

As you may recall, I went to Puerto Rico earlier this year for NASFiC. This was a big deal for me. I’ve never been to the Caribbean, let alone to a Spanish-speaking country; it also preceded the horrible devastation that befell the island not long ago (please donate to the Hispanic Federation if you can). Yup. Caribbean SF scholar. Never been to the Caribbean…until 2017. Go figure.

Duke’s Herp Files 002: Reptile-tastic Photos and Video from 8/6 -> 8/15/15

What do you get when you talk about something you’d like to see while herping for something else? Sometimes, you find that very thing. That’s what happened to me. In the last two weeks, I’ve managed to add nearly ten species to my list, which I’ll share with everyone on another date. What’s in this edition of Duke’s Herp Files?

Duke’s Herp Files 001: Reptile-tastic Photos and Videos from 7/16 & 7/28/15