SkiP HappEns Podcast
Skip Clark is a dynamic and captivating podcast host and radio personality who has left an indelible mark on the world of broadcasting. With a voice that can command attention and a personality that oozes charm, Skip has become a beloved figure in the world of entertainment. His passion for storytelling and his ability to connect with his audience shine through in every episode of his podcast and every moment on the airwaves.
Skip’s journey in radio began decades ago, and he has since evolved into a seasoned professional who effortlessly navigates the waves of the media industry. His deep knowledge of music, pop culture, and current events keeps his listeners engaged and coming back for more. Skip Clark's enthusiasm and authenticity make him a trusted voice in the world of podcasting and radio. His dedication to his craft and his commitment to providing quality content continue to make him a standout in the world of broadcasting.
SkiP HappEns Podcast
Exploring the World of Snakes: From Breeding Eastern Indigos to Finding Therapy in Reptiles
Join us for a captivating conversation as we step away from our regular country music discussions to explore the fascinating world of snakes with our special guest, Virgil Dombrowski from Endeavor Reptiles Incorporated. Virgil opens up about his journey from a small collection to managing over 700 snakes, including the remarkable Eastern Indigo. Known for its intelligence and protected status, the Eastern Indigo offers a glimpse into the complexities of snake breeding and the legalities involved. Discover the intricacies of maintaining such an extensive collection and the importance of handling these incredible creatures to dispel common fears and misconceptions.
In this episode, we challenge the traditional notions of snake ownership and breeding. Discover the differences between venomous and non-venomous species and laugh along with us at the humorous trials of pairing snakes, including the occasional mix-up of gender identification. Virgil shares his experiences in breeding and incubating snake eggs, from understanding genetics to the challenges of creating the perfect environment for successful hatching. The beauty of scaleless snakes and the genetic intrigue of microscale snakes are discussed, inspiring a newfound appreciation for these often misunderstood reptiles.
Beyond the technicalities of breeding, our conversation shifts to the therapeutic and business aspects of caring for snakes. Virgil shares his personal journey through the emotional impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, finding solace and purpose in reptiles. Learn about the supportive community within the snake industry and the exciting world of reptile shows and conferences. We explore how a passion for these creatures can lead to fulfilling and unexpected ventures, emphasizing the joy of connecting people with pets that bring comfort and joy. This episode promises to entertain, educate, and perhaps even change your perspective on the world of reptiles.
Thanks for listening! Follow us at youtube.com/c/skiphappens
Hi everybody, Welcome to Skip Happens. I don't even know where to start. As you know, with Skip Happens normally I sit down with a lot of artists up-and-coming artists, well-established country music artists, and now, every once in a while, with the Skip Happens podcast. I kind of get away from that a little bit, Maybe a whole lot. Tonight my friend Virgil Dombrowski is hanging with me. He's Endeavor Reptiles Incorporated and we were talking the other day and he told me how he got into. You know, maybe just owning a few snakes, A few. And when I say a few, Virgil, how many?
Speaker 2:I really don't know the actual number, Skip, but with the babies that I've hatched this year, I'm pushing well over 700 snakes.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow, yeah, oh my gosh. Now, what is that that you're showing me right now?
Speaker 2:So this is like the creme de la creme of colubrids. Colubrids are the egg laying egg laying snakes in the U? S. This is uh well, colubrids are all over the place, but in the U S? Um, this is the top predator here in the United States. This is native to Florida. This is, this is the Eastern Indigo and this is native to Northern Florida, a little bit of Southern Georgia, louisiana area, up in that panhandle of Florida area, uh, mostly northern area and this is the eastern indigo.
Speaker 2:These guys, this one here particularly, is a really chill, chill one. I've been working with him for a while now. Most of the time you're not going to want to do what I'm doing right now with this guy and grab his head and just like, do whatever I want with this snake. Has he known you? He's pretty cool. These snakes are are brilliant, like they're super high, intelligent on on the level. These are like mensa snakes. If, if you, if you put them on iq level. Um, but these guys eat rattlesnakes for for brunch like full-grown really rattlesnakes, yeah let me, let me ask you what I mean.
Speaker 1:What do you feed that?
Speaker 2:I feed him mostly mice. I feed him frozen thawed. Pretty much everything I have here eats frozen thawed. So I buy, I get stuff shipped in frozen. I have a big chest freezer full of mice and rats. So I give him like a medium size, a small excuse me, small rat to medium sized rat. I give him extra large and large mice. I also feed him quail from time to time. Quail, no, not quail. Yep, they do eat quail. They do eat baby chicks. Okay, but I buy everything frozen fog, like I said.
Speaker 1:I used to raise quail. Growing up quail and pheasants, I used to raise those both with the Anglers Association, so that was something I was doing. That's why I said quail no, not quail. Wow, let's see.
Speaker 2:Super, super tame these guys are actually. This is on the endangered on the threatened species list. I had to get paperwork through US Fish and Wildlife Services, federally and statewide to be able to have this snake.
Speaker 1:Okay, I was going to ask you about that because obviously you've got a huge operation going on there with the number of snakes that you have and what you're doing with the breeding and all that. You had to register, get a license, get a certificate of some sort. What do you have to do with the government to do that?
Speaker 2:For this snake only. Really yeah, for this snake only because it's on a threatened, endangered species. I got you, um, yeah, just for this snake only, not, not, none of the other ones I have everything else is is uh easy. You can ship in and out. Ship in and out these guys. I don't like having this part right here pointing towards me. Um, these guys are notorious for like just projectile eliminating stuff. Um, knock on wood, hasn't happened to me yet, but they, they like to eat. These are the garbage disposals.
Speaker 1:So no, it look. I mean, he looks smooth, shiny, beautiful um nothing but muscle.
Speaker 2:Skip. If this guy were to put me in handcuffs and like, really wrap me, there's I. I am not getting out of those handcuffs.
Speaker 1:Now, how big will a snake like that get? Do you know?
Speaker 2:This guy here is already. He's already going on. I'd say probably.
Speaker 1:Six.
Speaker 2:No, no, no, no. He's probably maybe going on four feet. What, yeah, he's only I mean my arm span. My arm span from side to side, from fingertip to fingertip, six and a half feet. So I mean he's, he's, you know, I'll put his, I'll put his head out here by my hands and Okay.
Speaker 1:Good four feet, you know. Okay, it makes a little more sense.
Speaker 2:Good four feet, but he can get like seven feet, seven, I mean.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:There's always like people say well, how big is a corn snake? Get it can. I've heard six feet, but I don't know. I think four to five feet, for most of them are going to be four feet. You know, every, every, every individual is going to be different. Okay.
Speaker 1:That's amazing, virgil, that is amazing. I mean, you know, the funny thing is you're holding you're, you're holding snake and he seems pretty tame for the most part.
Speaker 2:If he was hungry, I would not be holding him like this.
Speaker 1:So, talking about that, though, before I carry on with, what I was going to say is how often do you feed them? Is it once a week, once a month?
Speaker 2:It depends on the species as well, but this guy here he can eat every three or four days, depending on the size of the meal. He's constantly scanning, constantly thinking, like right now he's looking and just thinking and smelling the air Like he's just, he's really, really. I got very, very lucky getting this particular snake. I did a lot of homework. I've been researching stuff for years now. For about three years, I've been, you know, researching stuff for years now. For over about three years, I've been researching everything and it took me a long time to to find a breeder that I trusted to be able to get me a really docile, cool, chill, uh.
Speaker 1:eastern indigo you know, um, and I'll tell everybody and I already told you before we went out with the lights and the cameras the fact that um was that first of all, was that one of those you are actually going to bring over to my studio tonight?
Speaker 1:This was yes, oh so I, you know, my wife gave me a call at work before I left the radio station today and she goes, honey, she goes. Do you have a podcast tonight? And I said yes, she goes. Oh, cool, yeah, what's going on? I said my friend Virgil's coming over and she goes. Not the guy with the snakes, I go, yes, the guy with the snakes, she goes. And all of a sudden I mean you could hear her throughout. You probably heard her at your place, any other side of town. He's like absolutely not. There will be no snakes in my house and so that's why you're there.
Speaker 2:And I'm here. You know what, though, it worked out better, because this way I can show you, all the guys, a lot more different different species. I can show you a lot of different, different colors, different patterns, designs, different sizes, whereas me, bringing over stuff, I would have had to bring over a specific, you know, a small amount. So it worked out better.
Speaker 1:It worked out good Look at is rather relaxed.
Speaker 2:So this guy here, he's going to get really big and he is a freight train when he comes at you when he's hungry. If I don't feed him every four or five days, he gets hungry real quick. His metabolism is very, very, very fast. So if I don't feed him, if I go a week, he's hungry and he'll come at me. There have been times during the summertime where I've been stupid busy and I have so much to take care of that, you know, maybe a week might go by before I feed him again. It's no big deal. These guys can go months without eating. But he is the way he looks because he is well-fed, well-taken care of, well-hydrated. I do hold him on a regular basis because I want to be able to do this. I want to be able to do this with this guy and he is super smart enough to realize that it's. There's no food out right now, you know, but if there was a scent of food in the air he'd be all over it.
Speaker 2:He might, his attitude would change, you know there's no way that um that snake would survive if it got out in this climate? I don't know, I don't think so.
Speaker 1:Not, not, not, not central new york but I'll tell you, you know, if I saw that snake, I'd be running away. You're talking about him being four feet.
Speaker 2:I'd have four feet running well another thing too is these guys not only do they can, they flare out their throat a little bit, like they puff up their throat to look a little bit bigger and more, more badass at you, they also hiss like they give this like kind of sound if they like, breathe real heavy, if they're not happy with you at the moment. So, like I basically like right now I can, I can, I could put him down, I could put him in his enclosure, I can clean out his enclosure. Right now he's totally chill Cause he's. He was fed just a couple of days ago so he's still full, still digesting those three mice that I gave him. I gave him three medium sized mice.
Speaker 2:But when he's hungry, if you feed him a mouse and he's attacking that mouse and you go to reach in there to change his water or you know chain, clean out some poo that's in there, he lets you know it. He lets you know get back off, get away. But I mean that's people are these animals for? Really for no reason, if you really think about why are we afraid of such?
Speaker 1:a thing. That's what I wanted to ask you Really. I mean I get a little creeped out with snakes. I'm not going to lie, I do. But I think the more I you know, you and I have been talking here a little bit and just knowing each other, and maybe I don't feel as bad as I did or as creeped out as I did, but still I don't. I mean, I'm watching what you're doing there and I don't know. I don't even know how to explain this.
Speaker 2:Well, let me tell you, Skip, most people have two different thoughts. One, if you were here right now and you were holding this guy and you were basically feeling this muscle structure and how this is, and you were looking at how he moves and the way how these things eat and the way they can shed, can shed their skin and get brand new, beautiful, shiny, gorgeous skin, and he just shed, like maybe maybe a week and a half, two weeks ago, he just shed, so he's, he's got some relatively new skin. I, you, you leave here with a different attitude for these creatures. I absolutely guarantee that you would. You would you would feel this guy and you would absolutely have a different attitude towards him. I think a lot of people are afraid, unnecessarily afraid, because it's just lack of knowledge. They think that these guys are, are demonic, they're, they're beasts, they're scary, they're going to come after you and attack you. And they see these images that's portrayed everywhere of these, you know, cobras hooded up and struck.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's not. That's not the nature of these animals. The only time those animals do that, those cobras, is when they're antagonized, when they're pushed to the limits, where they're like whoa back off. It's no different than you and I standing there puffing up our chest telling another guy back up, buddy, Back up.
Speaker 1:That's what they're doing.
Speaker 2:That's what they're doing. The only time really, really really, when people get bit by a snake is when you startle them and surprise them. They don't have eyelids so you don't know if they're sleeping. If I go, reach my hand and they're just reaching there and grab a hold of them, I'm going to scare them. They might turn around and get me Same thing a dog does.
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 2:Definitely if does. But oh, that's true, that's true. But I definitely if I saw a snake, I'm not reaching in any anywhere to get it's like I'm just saying his enclosure either. I mean I open his enclosure, I let him know I'm there, I'll flip up his, his hide, that he hides in his little, this little home that he stays in. These guys curl up in a ball, this this big, and they stay right. So they stay in nature in a hole in the ground or a log or a rock area this big around, like they just curl up a little tiny ball, this snake this is. This is one of my breeding tubs, for my, for my female. They exit this snake. Could you could put two of these snakes in this tub. Really it would fit right. They just curl right up.
Speaker 2:But I think people get bit because, one, they startle the snake and it's a defensive bite because the snake thinks you're trying to hurt it or eat it. Two, it thinks you're food. I mean, that's the majority of bites that from from normal. You know pet owners, they reach their hand in their boa constrictor enclosure and the things hungry. They see movement and you know those. Those, a lot of the other things are not as smart as this. This one gets the gist real quick that I'm not food it's funny I'm reading some of the comments uh on here.
Speaker 1:Dorothy's like no, no, no, no way, and she says you wouldn't get me in that room, no matter how small.
Speaker 2:So I just I guaranteed, I guarantee dorothy, if you came and checked out this guy in person, you'd have a different attitude.
Speaker 1:Come on, dorothy you're gonna put them back what'd you say?
Speaker 1:are you gonna put them back and we'll talk about something else here. This is totally amazing. I uh, like I say, with skip happens, I kind of decided to do something a little bit different, kind of drift away from the artists for this week, uh, and talk, uh, you know about, about what's going on and about Virgil and what he's doing Just the number of snakes he has there, and I know he's going to show us some of the babies. I know that's what he's doing. He's going to show us some of the babies and the eggs and the hatching and all that because it is amazing. Would I do it? I don't know, but we're going to find out why he does it in just a moment or two too.
Speaker 1:So that's pretty cool why, do you do it I usually wash.
Speaker 2:I wash my hands between, especially with that snake there, and the reason why I'm holding him first and foremost is in nature. Like I said, he's rattle snakes for brunch he is. He's a um, a snake eater in nature too. So I don't want to handle any other snakes and then go ahead and have that on my hands for him to think that I am a snake Because you do this in front of his face all of a sudden.
Speaker 1:You're a snake, he's going to try to get me, and venomous or poisonous, they still have the fangs, correct.
Speaker 2:No, not all. Only venomous snakes have the fangs because they use them to inject. Venomous snakes have the fangs because they inject. Now there are snakes called semi-venomous that I do have, like Western hog noses and Madagascar cat eyes, but they're called semi-venomous because I've heard it called semi-venomous. Some people argue it's not at all venomous but more like a bee sting kind of thing if you let them gnaw on you and their saliva gets down inside. So venom snakes are venomous because they they inject a lot of people's poisonous so there's a difference, right there's a total yeah, total difference.
Speaker 2:So poison is what you ingest. You call poison control.
Speaker 2:If you drink something you shouldn't okay also the you shouldn't, or it's absorbed through your skin. So that's poisoned and venom and venomated venom. Venom is where you um get, actually get injected into you. So king cobra will use that as the main, the most most popular example. That's gonna. It's gonna sink its teeth into you. Gaboon viper's gonna stick its teeth in you. It's gonna envenomate you, but it's venom, um. But these guys, they don't have those kind of doesn't? They don't have rear facing fangs. These guys have just normal mouths, normal teeth.
Speaker 1:They have teeth though.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, they have teeth.
Speaker 1:All right, I didn't know, maybe they just had gum, I don't know.
Speaker 2:I've been dealing with hundreds and hundreds of snakes, for this is my third year this month Well, actually last month was my third year involved in this whole, this whole industry, this whole hobby, this whole market, this whole everything. And I have had, um, I'll show you, I'll show you, I'll show you a snake, the complete opposite spectrum. Now this snake's gonna get like seven, seven feet long. Um, its mouth opens up like 180 degrees. Oh my god, its mouth can open like this.
Speaker 1:You seem very excited telling us about that, but I can't wait to see it.
Speaker 2:I know this because when this thing was a little whippersnapper I'm talking like maybe a foot long she tagged me every time I went inside her enclosure. That little snot got me every single time. Now she's bigger. I've had her for two years, over two and a half years, about two and a half years now. She is totally knock on wood, a lot more chill. She's not as smart as the other snake that I just showed you guys, as the eastern indigo is. She's totally chill. She is a runner, she likes to move real quick, she likes to move a lot. She's a leucistic Texas rat snake. Let me go grab her.
Speaker 1:Go grab her. I don't even know how he tells the difference between male and female. We're going to find out about that as well. I'm getting an education right alongside you tonight, so we need to. Well, I don't know if I need to do anything, but we'll see. Oh boy, oh boy, here comes Virgil. Here he comes. All right, wow, that's like an albino snake.
Speaker 2:Yep, so albino people call albino. This is actually what's called leucistic, where there is no coloration whatsoever. Albino in layman's terms is well, not in layman's terms, but albino is called amelanistic. So if something's amelanistic, it takes away all the melanin and it basically gives you a lighter colored the darker colors are gone gives you a lighter colored snake. This eliminates the colors totally. So you're going to get a pure white snake on this. So this is a Texas rat snake. We'll see if we can get a closer up view of her face.
Speaker 2:And you're asking how do you know if it's a male or female? Yes, most of the time there's two different ways that you can do. One way I do not do. I haven't learned that way yet, because I do want to preface all this by saying I'm a beginner, I'm a newbie. I have come into this market and I've absorbed everything as much as I can, and this is all I've been doing for the past three years now, um outside of my other companies that I do have and operate, but I've been absorbed like a sponge. I have a really great group of network of mentors, of people that I call upon, that are helping me along the way Um this, this market. This industry, this hobby is a great, great hobby with a lot of people from every, every aspect of life, every walk of life, every you know, economic background, these, this industry, this hobby is is such a cool conglomerate of people.
Speaker 1:Do you do, Virgil? Do you think it's becoming more popular? And you know, we've got so much going on in the world, so many changes overall. Do you think something like this is becoming more popular?
Speaker 2:This is a million excuse me, a billion and a half dollar industry. Wow, it's only growing. Yeah, it's absolutely growing. During COVID it exploded and that's when I came into the market, and I'm only saying that from the short few years that I've been into the market, but I'm just saying off what I've heard other people say. Obviously, ball pythons have led the way. There's so many morphs and so much stuff with ball pythons. I do have about 50 ball pythons, but I've kept. I kept for the first two years. I kept blinders on away from ball pythons because Everybody has them out there. I want to stuff. That was a little bit different so that's like yeah, the Western hog noses and kind of.
Speaker 2:I first got in the corns and King snakes and some milk snakes and then I found Western hogs and I just fell in love with the Western hogs. But this is my leucistic Texas rat. Let me show you real fast how you can tell. There's two ways you can tell how they're male or female. One is by a thing called probing, where you legit take a like a dentistry tool this I, I have this just to clean out stuff but probing that I'm thinking of, like when you go to the doctors and have your temperature taken, is yeah, you basically.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it looks like yeah.
Speaker 1:All right, all right.
Speaker 2:The distance that that goes inside the. You know, these are actually kind of related to chickens and I'll funny, I'll kind of say how and why A snake has one opening, okay, without getting too Yep yep. Oh, what does she do?
Speaker 1:Oh, no, Well, anyways, did she do? Oh no, well, anyways, we did see it for a quick second.
Speaker 2:Hang on hang on.
Speaker 1:That's all right. Yeah, I know she didn't want you looking at her butt. That was the whole thing.
Speaker 2:Oh, what happened.
Speaker 1:No, I don't know. Here we go, there you go.
Speaker 2:You're back, oh look might have, that's right. She did so. There's one opening called a cloaca, right here you can see it. Yep, read, pee, poop, lay eggs, everything through one opening.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Same thing a chicken does. Chicken has one opening.
Speaker 1:It makes life a whole lot easier. Think about it, yeah.
Speaker 2:Everything. So usually the distance of the tail on a female is going to be more short and stout. Now this is a texas rat, so a little bit different. But a female is going to give you a short, stout tail where here's the cloaca. It is a fast, fast transition to short and stout. A male is going to have much longer tail, longer transition to the tip of the tail oh, wow that's how you can tell without having to probe everything.
Speaker 2:So and if you have, like an adult western hog nose that I can show you, um, you can see the difference night and day. Like immediately, on some corn snakes it's it tougher, and on this one here it's definitely tougher. Unless somebody sold me a male, which has happened already. So this girl here she was a nipper when I first got her and now she's totally chill, totally cool. But at the same time, again, you don't put your face in her face either. You know what I?
Speaker 1:mean Right right Now, with the action of the tongue? Is that like hoping to catch a fly or what?
Speaker 2:No, she is smelling her surroundings.
Speaker 1:With her tongue.
Speaker 2:Yep. So there's an organ in the top of their mouth called the Jacobson organ.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:They're gathering information, bringing it in, and that's how they're basically tasting the air around them to see what's going on.
Speaker 1:So they would know also if there was food in the area. Oh right, Because it would be a really good scent.
Speaker 2:Right, mmm dinner? Yeah, definitely right away, immediately. Wow, so it's amazing.
Speaker 1:Let me put her back, yep, put her back, put her back in her home. This is rather interesting. I will say it is very interesting, virgil. Just you know it's endeavor, reptiles incorporated. I asked him earlier about. You know, I see all the snakes, but with the radio station, for example, I did a what they call a radio remote, had an appearance at an exotic pets establishment and they had the bearded dragon, they had the um, you know, turtles, the tortoises, they had just about anything and everything, and the prices on some of those went from just a few dollars to thousands of dollars, depending on what the reptile was. So I can only imagine, virgil, what some of these snakes might be worth tens of thousands of dollars, depending on what the reptile was. So I can only imagine, virgil, what some of these snakes might be worth.
Speaker 2:Tens of thousands of dollars. There are snakes for sale for right now. Yeah, wow, I don't have any of those, but yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So if you wanted to go online, you do your research and you say hey, I like that snake, I want to buy it. I mean is there a site that you go to? Like snake, I want to buy it. I mean, is there a?
Speaker 2:site that you go to, like I mean, I go to a dealership and look for trucks. You go to, uh, maybe like a store that specializes in snakes and that's where you buy them. Right, yeah, the best thing that you can do is go to a reptile expo, local reptile expo. Go to an expo and talk to the breeders, talk to talk to us. I have not exhibited at an expo yet, but I will be coming up this spring. Um, I I've been in this for three years and I bought the majority of my snakes. I bought as small little you know, 12 inch, 10 inch long little little pencils and um raised them up to the point where they could breed. Um, this year is my last year. I got two clutches of eggs like litters of eggs.
Speaker 1:You and I were talking earlier about litters yeah, well, I figured it'd be like litter, even though it's yep.
Speaker 2:So I got two clutches last year and now this year. I I believe I have six, 62 clutches of eggs this year. Wow, now, not every clutch has a lot of eggs, um, a bunch of them have you know, one to five eggs, a lot, of, a lot of first year breeder girls, um, but I have. I have other clutches that have 18 good eggs per clutch and then they double clutched and gave they can, they can retain the sperm and two months later have a whole, nother clutch of eggs with the same sperm, so to speak yeah, it's this.
Speaker 2:The, the mother, the world of mother nature is is really really, really interesting. Skiff, you can. You can breed a female and I'm just going to make up stuff right now. Okay, just for easy, for easy terms gotcha breed. I could breed a, and this is not how these genetics work. Again, just easy terms gotcha. I could breed a, and this is not how these genetics work again just easy terms.
Speaker 2:I could breed a red snake with a white snake and have pink babies. I could have red babies. I could have white babies. I could breed a red snake with a blue snake. That should give me purple babies. Right now, the recessive genes and the genetics do not work that way, so please don't don't go that way. My example, what I'm trying to do, is you could have a snake that has babies that are red, white or blue, meaning that she could dual sire. She could have sperm from two different fathers fertilized, two different eggs within the same clutch and they can hold that sperm, I've heard people say for years and all of a sudden pop out a clutch of eggs that's amazing most of the time, obviously it's not going to happen.
Speaker 2:You're going to put a male, male and you're. You know, like I this year here I put multiple males in with with the same female, but I also put multiple males in that I knew the genetics of each male, so I knew what, depending on the babies, came out, which would be this, the sire for that clutch. So you're not going to most time you're not going to have a dual sire clutch. It does happen, but most of the time it's not going to happen let's talk about the eggs, though.
Speaker 1:the is there like the average incubate. Incubation period I can't talk tonight, these headphones screw me up sometimes, that's the word. But incubation period, are they all basically the same? And then do you have to keep it a certain temperature when you put them in the incubator? I mean, explain all that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's, recreating Mother Nature is not easy, and recreating Mother Nature as one man with this volume is just stupid of me. But you do it. I do it because I love it but I have no life, but anyway, um, to get the breeding, you want the breeding process or the incubation well, let's talk about the incubation.
Speaker 1:so the snake lays An egg, two, three, 20. 20, okay, now where does it go from there?
Speaker 2:So I have these incubation tubs or, excuse me, these lay boxes.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:This is moist sphagnum moss that's in these boxes and it basically simulates as if she's going kind of underground to lay her eggs in a little hibernaculum, a little old mouse tunnel. Whatever the temperature down below it stays a constant temperature. So I mean it fluctuates a little tiny bit here and there, but most of the time it stays a pretty constant temperature. So after they lay their eggs, prior to laying their eggs, they shed their skin and that's typically about a week or so, a week to 10 days prior to them laying their eggs. So when I go through and I feed and I'm cleaning and I see a shed in there, a fresh shed, and it's a month or so after I introduce the male to them, I know she's probably going to lay her eggs. So I keep an eye on that tub, collect those eggs, I take those eggs and I put those inside um another tub that looks like this and that has a. I use a vermiculite, sphagnum moss, organic potting earth, earth mixture okay moisture.
Speaker 2:Um, my incubator is like 60. I keep it at 60 all the time. Just happens to be there, so 60 moisture at. I keep it at 80 degrees and I time it just happens to be there, so 60% moisture. I keep it at 80 degrees and I have a whole incubator that the door opens up and it's like a big, huge, massive wine cooler, but I keep it at 80 degrees. And corn snakes are about 60 days. Western hogs are a little bit less, but around the same kind of period. It depends on the temperature. If you do 82 degrees, they're going to hatch a couple of days sooner. If you do 78 degrees, they're going to hatch a couple of days later. It slows down their growth process, gives them a few more days. Next year I probably will do around 78 degrees incubation because this room that I have here is kept at 78 degrees all the time. So I'm I'm literally slightly tacky at any moment. Um, it feels, it feels really good when I leave this room and go out into the main warehouse but it does.
Speaker 2:Um, but I'm getting used to it as well. So, um, it can be like an old person that needs to turn the heat up all the time, you know. Um so, but 80 degrees for 60 days on average, 60 days ish. Um, I hatched a bunch of scaleless corn snakes this year, like that was my focus three years ago, and I was buying was. I want to produce as many scaleless corn snakes as I can. I love those, um, so I produced, I think, about 40, 40 babies this year of my 300 plus that I have why do do you love those?
Speaker 1:Why do you like those as opposed to some of the others?
Speaker 2:I like being able to. You can actually see through their skin and you can see, like the legit, like you can see their organs in there. Let me go grab one. Let me go grab one.
Speaker 1:Oh boy, here we go. You got a wide selection there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, before before the end of the night, please don't let me forget I I want to show you guys the snakes that made me want to become a breeder okay, I'll remind you, don't worry.
Speaker 1:All right, I will definitely. I'll definitely remind you. Just amazing, just amazing, that this room is set up with all these snakes 78 degrees. It's pretty cool, this is pretty cool. If you have questions, by the way, if you want to just put them in the comment uh area, I'll definitely. Uh, you know, I'll ask. Uh, virgil, so I don't know, it's something I never thought. You know what to me, I wouldn't be doing this. Uh, just, it's probably because of not being educated.
Speaker 2:So, oh, look at this so this is a caramel scaleless. I don't hold her an awful lot.
Speaker 2:Maybe she's the wrong one to grab the show yeah, she's not too happy well, every time my, my temperature, my finger touches her, the temperature changes on her. So she can, she can sense that through her. But these guys have really, really, really she'll. She'll calm down in a minute here, I don't hold her a whole lot, so, um, but these guys have. When you, when you get the, the snows that are pure white, you can actually see their organs right through their skin. You can see their veins. It's really tough to see this stuff, but these guys have. They have ventral scales, they have their belly scales for locomotion and for movement and stuff. They actually have no scales on their actual bodies. So that's all smooth. It feels like velvet Skip. Really, it legit feels like velvet. She is so soft and so it feels like velvet. They're just so pretty. This is what the snakes actually look like underneath their scales. You know, like a polar bear isn't white, it's black right right.
Speaker 2:So when you see a snake and you see all the different colors on a snake, that's not necessarily like exactly their colors. Their colors are going through their scales to show a different color, like I have lavender, like almost purple colored snakes. But when you turn them, when you get the scaleless version, they look great. Wow, because the scales, the scales show an awful lot. Let me, let me put this one back. I don't have to watch some of these ones. Um, between the rat snake, the eastern indigo corn snakes, I'm going to wash my hands between, in between the different species. I want, I don't want this snake. I don't want this snake to get afraid of smelling a rat snake on me.
Speaker 1:No, you don't want that, as he's doing that. I don't know if they do any of these shows here in central New York, but we should take the Skip Happens podcast there and actually talk to some of the breeders and some of those that do this for a living. And Virgil, I think, do this for a living and Virgil, I think it started out as a hobby. Now it seems to be pretty much a just a way of life for him, which is kind of cool. So, and you can see all those bins and they all have snakes in them. I'd be like what if one gets loose? You know what? I have a great question when he comes back. Hopefully nothing like this ever happens. But first responders and they have to respond to your Virgil, so God forbid any of this happens. But let's say you have a fire, first responders show up, they see the snakes, they're going to go crap. What do we do? Or do they know ahead of time?
Speaker 2:Anything that's venomous, because so. So the same paperwork that I got through the new york fish and wildlife services and the federal fish and wildlife, us fish and wildlife services, anything that's venomous, let's say I, I decide someday I want to go out and be an educator and do school shows and get back to my performing roots again, like I used to do. Um, you have to have it registered with the local company so they, they would know ahead of time the dispatch should say, hey, there's venomous snakes on location, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it has, I'm sure. I don't know this for sure, but I'm assuming it would have to be marked off like where they are in the building. I'm sure you'd have to give them a diagram of your building of some sorts, on a window or on a door or something like that.
Speaker 2:I'm assuming that that would be the case but, I know you have to have it registered with the county.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that would make sense, so that a dispatcher would be able to tell the responding fire police, paramedics, whatever they just let you know there's venomous snakes at this location or there's snakes.
Speaker 2:I don't have, I don't have anything like that and I and I will not skip I'm not interested in having that stuff in my life. Um, I, I value my fingers, my hands, my, my life too much to have those kind of animals. They're beautiful. They're gorgeous that everything, everything has its place, and I'm not gonna sit and bad mouth anybody that does have those animals. But to me it's just a time, it's just a, a tick, a tick of a stopwatch, of waiting to happen you never know yeah just waiting for something to happen.
Speaker 2:It's just just give it time, unfortunately so. But back to the scaleless thing. Why do I like the much? The scaleless snakes also come in a really much more exotic version called microscale, and microscale started over in, I think, france, and they've been imported into the US, and I'm fortunate enough to get to have a bunch of het microscale. So there's homozygous and heterozygous. Heterozygous is carrying one copy of the gene, homozygous is carrying two copies of the gene. So I have snakes that look like normal corn snakes but they're carrying these really special genes that actually give you this look. And this is a micro scale corn snake.
Speaker 1:So there's scales on there, but they're very, very, very tiny.
Speaker 2:Very, very, very tiny, and what they do is they create the patterns in such a different way. I'm telling you like this world is like the fashion world, like they talk so much about. Oh, look at the on the side of the jaw, the blah, blah, blah. So these here this is actually a hybrid between a micro scale and a scaleless. This is called a micro scaleless. I have the jeans for micro scale and in two years I should have micro scale babies of my own, but they're, they're stupid, expensive, um, so I'm going to be creating those myself cool.
Speaker 1:Um, so when you talk about the design or the pattern on this snake, is it very unique to that snake itself, even though the colors may be the same between you know, with the snakes, but the pattern is it unique to that particular snake?
Speaker 2:Each snake, each species has its own patterning Right.
Speaker 1:I didn't know if you had another one. Let's say another one of those.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I do, I'll grab one, I'll show you, I'll show you. I'll show you two that I produced last year. I'll bring over both brother and sister and I'll show you. I'll show you two that I produced last year. I'll bring over both brother and sister and I'll show you those two. So this is a normal corn snake pattern. The tops of these things are called saddles, the tops Okay.
Speaker 2:And then there's different genes. There's a stripe gene in corn snakes, and then there's a gene called a tessera, or, if you really want to be fancy, it's called tessera.
Speaker 1:I'm not fancy. I'm far from fancy. I'm learning as I go here. I don't even know what questions to ask because I know nothing about this. I am fascinated look at this.
Speaker 2:This could be part one of a series of of, of uh of videos we can do together, so don't worry we're good friends, we can do this anytime you want to do it, and so it's pretty cool. And you were telling me earlier, you have the like the remote system.
Speaker 1:So I do have a total. I have a. I can take everything that I have here I can also take on the road. I have a whole complete you know podcast set up.
Speaker 2:So but that would that would enable you and your wife to be able to come here.
Speaker 1:I doubt my wife would be there. I just very much doubt it. But I would like to go to one of those shows. If there's maybe a conference or something going on reptile owners or people like that that work with these reptiles right along, I would love to come out with a podcast, sit down and talk to people that know what they're talking about virgil, because I don't know what I'm talking about, obviously, and and again. I'm a newbie, so you're doing pretty damn well, my friend so this is again.
Speaker 2:This is, this is the normal pattern. This is called the snow okay, okay so this, this one here, is a little bit different, and the reason why I hatched this one out last year but the reason why I kept the entire clutch, I didn't sell any of these is because this has I don't know if you can see in there. It has the green yellow tint to it. It's hard to see it, but yeah, in real life you can see it. There's green, yellow on around all the saddles and it's called a thing called halo.
Speaker 2:And I didn't realize that I even had halo in the genetic pool when I put the parents together oh, wow so I, I it wasn't wasn't until the third shed that I found out that these guys actually have halo in them, so I kept the entire clutch. Now this one here. This is called the tessera. So this is an anerythristic tessera, a dark colored tessera, and you see the the stripe down its back yes and then you see on its side walls where it's like blasted all apart, where you can see that there's a specific pattern to that oh yeah, okay here the side walls get all blasted apart, and that's what tessera does.
Speaker 2:So tessera is an incomplete dominant gene. When you put a normal and a tessera together which I could breed these together because you can do that with reptiles, um, even though they're siblings for multiple generations you could do that if you wanted, um. And. And there's a whole, nother, whole, nother thing called polygenics or line breeding, where you take the best of the best and you're like you basically keep, keep it going down the line. You can do that with siblings, but if I put this pair together genetically after, babies should look like this wow. What's really weird, though, is if I take another tessera and another tessera and I put them together, all the babies would be tessera, but part of those babies would be what's called super tessera.
Speaker 2:So if, then, you took that super tessera and put it with a normal, every baby would be then tessera instead of half and half okay, you kind of lost me, but okay I have been learning this stuff just to try and absorb it as like a sponge, and and I just had a conversation not only does it go that route, there's also t positive, t negative, which I'm still confused about, but they're all. There's all kinds of stuff that goes in with a different species as well. Each one's a little bit different, so, but these are two babies I hatched last year and I'm keeping them.
Speaker 1:They're a year old and look at, I mean they, actually they've grown quite a bit, because when they're, when they're hatched, they gotta be just so tiny because they come out of the these little little little little eggs, right, exactly.
Speaker 2:That's the egg. That's the size of the egg compared to my thumb.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, there you go. Yeah, tiny, so one-year-old, I mean, they've done pretty good, you've been feeding them good.
Speaker 2:These ones like to eat, you know.
Speaker 1:As you can see, he's in the back there and he's he's got all the little drawers with snakes, so it's kind of cool, very cool. Yeah, do you name your snakes?
Speaker 2:I do have a bunch of names. You do, I do and I think over time I'm going to name all of them. I'm going to name all of them because it's so much easier for me to remember. Instead of saying, oh, this is a diffused caramel testera, like naming off all the genetics and stuff, I personally can just name them, so I have names. Let me turn it this way just slightly, so I can.
Speaker 1:Okay, you're good.
Speaker 2:So on this rack right here, I have Morgan Freeman, Glenn Close. I paired Justin Timberlake with Brittany Spears and Christina Aguilera. This year I have Ed Sheeran was with Jillian Anderson and Emma Sohn, and then I have Kirsten Dunst was paired up with Danny Bonaduce, and then I have Kirsten Dunst. Kirsten Dunst was paired up with Danny Bonaduce, so it makes it easier for me to remember who's who and what's what you know instead of just a bunch.
Speaker 2:So I have Chad Kroger. Let me show you Chad Kroger. Chad Kroger is my badass rock star. He's named Chad Kroger. He's one of my biggest corns that I have Now.
Speaker 1:how do you know that's a corn snake?
Speaker 2:Just because you know your snakes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean that's what they, I mean that's what he did. I don't know, I'd see that out somewhere. I wouldn't know it was a corn. I have no idea, I'd just go. Oh my God, it's a snake Well there's like 2,500 species of snakes, skip.
Speaker 2:I mean there's no way. I mean, unless you're a herpetologist, I don't think you understand. I don't know. I have trade shows. I'm walking down the aisle and I look at stuff and I'm like I don't know what the hell that is.
Speaker 1:I don't know what that is so.
Speaker 2:Do they ever do a trade show here in town? Town? There's a couple of bigger ones and there's a couple of smaller ones around.
Speaker 1:We should take the podcast and you should. We should do it with you and somebody from the show and we'll go on location.
Speaker 2:I would absolutely love to do that stuff. There's pod, there's reptile podcasts on every night, podcasts all over the place, and and people. It's so interesting because people specialize in such different species too. Somebody might have, like, an emerald tree boa, somebody might have anacondas, somebody might have just Burmese pythons. I mostly have corns and western hogs. This guy here, he's the dad with the halo. After looking at him, he has a nice yellow-green tinge.
Speaker 1:I can see that they look so clean. They are. You know what I mean they're clean.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're not.
Speaker 1:People think that they're slimy and they're wet and they're like this isn't a worm. I'll tell you the truth, I was probably one of those that thought they were slimy and wet, and you know. But now I'm seeing, I'm seeing a whole different side of the thing. You know, it's not what I thought. Let me put it there. Yeah, I see that.
Speaker 2:Look at that Watch it move, oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:Look at the muscles. Wow, snake's going to go, keep doing that. It feels good.
Speaker 2:He's trying to wrap around everything.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's amazing, just amazing.
Speaker 2:That's one of my biggest coins, wow.
Speaker 1:So what does your wife think about all this?
Speaker 2:She thinks it's really crazy cool. She's not part of me working here with this stuff. She's not a part of the business, part of it all.
Speaker 1:But still doing what you do and what you guys do.
Speaker 2:She's super, super understanding, but still doing what you do and you know what what you guys do and is super understanding. I mean I'm, I'm here all the time. She goes to bed every pretty much every night, alone until until I get there, because I'm here taking care of all these animals, my, my problem and and this was told to me by a lot of people I should have should have listened to my problem in life skipping. You and I know each other for a long time. I don't do anything like normal people.
Speaker 1:I do. It's cool. I love that about you so it's, it's a sickness.
Speaker 2:Actually there's no medication for it, though I don't understand. I I go ten times in everything. I do no pun, but this time I kind of got bit, because 10 times taking care of 10 times the animals is a lot, it's, it's a lot. I'm, I'm. I would love to find somebody that I could trust to help me with this stuff. My wife loves the animals. She thinks it's crazy cool. She's 110% supportive of everything I'm doing here. But it's not her jam to come here and clean snake poop.
Speaker 1:Right, right.
Speaker 2:Like you're you're seeing, and when people go to expos and stuff like that, they're seeing these beautiful, gorgeous animals, but they're not seeing the, the, the, the piles of of snake poo that you got to clean on a daily basis, cause every these guys are metabolisms are fast, like you know you feed them and two days later you got to clean out their enclosure. If you don't, it just becomes rank and with so many animals it's just a nonstop, nonstop thing.
Speaker 1:So how long does it take you to go through? I mean, you've probably been in there for hours today.
Speaker 2:I spent. I spent every day of my life, hours and hours in this room. Yeah, yeah, I mean, and it's my choice, it's my my doing.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely, you're happy you like it it's to me, it's kind of like my I don't want to say sanctuary, but it's definitely something I enjoy. The time, um, with the animals. I enjoy looking at them, um, and and the process of breeding and hatching. I showed you prior to us going live. I showed you the some of the babies that are hatching. I showed you prior to us going live. I showed you some of the babies that are hatching right now the Western hog noses that are hatching, a clutch of sable condas that are hatching right now, and it's just to see them pop their little heads out of these legs and know that I had a little bit of a hand in that. Let me show you this and then I'll go back to what we were just talking about having a little hand in it and why I'm actually doing this. I think that's good. Yeah, so these are the eggs. You know the size of the eggs compared to my thumb.
Speaker 2:Okay, this is a decent-sized corn snake egg, so this is a fertilized egg. When they lay their eggs and they look white and they're kind of squishy, like almost like a mini water balloon, they feel like a little water balloon. They're squishy. They're not hard at all. This is harder because it's dry.
Speaker 2:It's yeah actually it's dry but that's a fertilized egg. When they lay their eggs that are unfertilized, this is kind of really cool. I found this in one of their enclosures one day jelly bean. It's a little bit bigger than jelly bean but it almost has like a hexagonal, like a honeycomb pattern to the inside yeah but this is an unfertilized egg. That is called. Basically people call it a slug. So when they're slugs, they they're unfertilized, they're fertilized.
Speaker 1:They come out looking like that so still, the the snakes will still lay an egg, so to speak. It just some aren't fertilized and some are exactly yep, you're gonna see both of those inside wherever the snake is yeah, so I have these tubs that they lay in. I have the tub, but thank god for tupperware I know right and the dollar story.
Speaker 2:You're right the goal is to get these, not these.
Speaker 1:Right. So I mean, but if the snakes need to mate, something needs to be fertilized, it's got to happen. Yeah, so do they ever like fight? If you put two snakes together, I mean, or is it pretty much it's going to be what it is?
Speaker 2:Most everything is not cohabitated. Everything is to its own, you think I'd like each snake has its own own tub within the rack systems, but obviously during breeding season you put the males of the females okay. I had a couple of things fight this year that I found out that I thought I was putting a male in with the female.
Speaker 2:Come to find out that the, the female, was actually another male oh boy they kind of, they kind of like, did this whole wrapping around each other kind of thing and nothing was happening. It's a tail end just up here by the heads and I kind of realized that those are damn it.
Speaker 1:That's another male so well in today's world, never mind yeah, I mean I think it happens in nature too.
Speaker 2:Out there, with an animal world too, the snakes, sometimes the females, are not very receptive to a specific male. So I might take that male out of the enclosure, let a couple of days go by, put him back, give her a meal and another mouse or whatever, and then put the male back in there again. And then, if that doesn't happen, if there's no magic happening, I turn Barry White on, or Kenny G A little more baby, I go come on, guys, you can do it, you can do it.
Speaker 1:That's freaking awesome.
Speaker 2:You would do that, I just you chocolates and I put it up next to the kid, next to the enclosure. I like some candles. Um, I will, I will, um, put a different mail in. You just put a different mailing, and if she's not ready to go, she's not ready to go. Um, I have some that. That, that actually my girl, the girl that I want to share with you guys, the one that got me to want to breed. When I saw this female, I went gosh, that Mother Nature made that, and if I could take this and put it with this, I could create something like that. It's pretty damn cool to be able to do that kind of stuff. But I just put a different male in. I did have one male that started fighting with the female and I realized he wasn't fighting with her. He was just a really aggressive male saying basically um, yeah, I want, I'm, I'm on that, like, uh, you know white on right.
Speaker 2:I want you and I'm going to do whatever it takes to get you he grabbed a hold of the back of her head and just held her right down and she gave me a beautiful clutch of eggs.
Speaker 2:But he did but if they're, if they're being like, ferocious with each other. I'm not going to let that happen. I'm not going to let that, obviously. But yeah, it's, it's a corn. Snakes are pretty quick. Western hog noses are very, very, very damn elusive animals Like they don't. They don't let you see what's what's going on too much. But you, you take the eggs out and you put them in the incubator. You don't leave them with a snake right right away.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, corn snakes are not really known so much for eating their eggs, but western hog noses have been known their eggs. King snakes have been known to eat their own eggs. Uh, okay, so you want to keep a good tight eye on those things. But you know, corn snakes they'll. They lock, they're called locking. Basically they're breeding when they lock. They're called locking. Basically they're breeding when they lock. How graphic do you want to go?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, it's a podcast. Go ahead, tell us.
Speaker 2:All right. So males have two parts called hemipenes there's two and females have the cloaca.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So the male, they'll slither against each other, and corn snakes, corn snakes happens really quick within I'm talking within minutes sometimes it's a snake pornography here everybody that's literally got. I sent the picture to one of my buddies. He's like dude, you shouldn't be like sending this stuff through the internet, but it happened. It happened the first time I ever saw what happened. I was like so excited these things are breeding.
Speaker 2:I've raised them for two and a half years to get them to this point no, I don't blame you, I get it basically they call it locking because the male will, will insert and then lock like lock on, like lock on, so the females not leaving anywhere, so they call it lock. If you see a lock, most of the time corn snakes, you're gonna see a lock, you're gonna get to a lock last anywhere from from a couple minutes to 15, 20 minutes, half hour at the most. I've seen um for myself personally. Western hog noses are known to lock for 10, 12 hours sometimes and and they're very elusive. You don't, you don't really see them too aggressive on the females. They're riding the females backs. It's funny. But the western hogs because western hogs are dimorphic, with two different sizes, like the females, like three times the size, four times the size of the male, oh wow, and you got to be really careful with those because those can eat the males like they'll.
Speaker 2:They'll eat their male really yeah, sometimes if you feed them up, you feed them so they're not hungry like that. But sometimes I've heard people say they've lost. You know, I know a girl in Florida that's a breeder that lost a $6,000 male Because she went in the house, made some food, grabbed her phone, went back out to her shed that she has out in Florida and the male's gone. So the female ate the male but he luckily had done his job in the meantime so she actually did lay eggs and she was able to get eggs from that. That that pairing.
Speaker 2:But, it's it's known to happen. So it did not happen for me, knock on wood this year. Um, I did have a bunch of egg binding happen with my Western hogs, where the eggs just get stuck in there. They don't want to come out too too well. First year breeding females, that happens a lot. There's a lot of mortality out there in nature, um, and trying to recreate nature inside is not easy. The temperatures, the humidities, the light cycles, the feeding cycles, um, there's a lot to learn and a lot to know.
Speaker 2:And I'm totally like in awe with everything of this stuff Skip, like in awe with everything of this stuff skip. I'm like I don't have to bs anybody in this world, but especially you, like I. I don't, I'm just scratching the surface of the knowledge of this stuff to be able to do this like, like some of these guys know, I'm just I have a really great group of friends.
Speaker 2:I call friends in this business, now that I in this market, in this hobby, that I call upon all the time and and they're're more than willing to come forth with information and share for the betterment of the hobby and the betterment of the animals and just make things good for everybody all the way around.
Speaker 1:Are you selling? Somebody gets a hold of you. You sell, you buy. How does that work?
Speaker 2:So I'm going to have I'll show you on my Instagram. I want to bring that up real fast, and then I want to go back to the story of how and why I got into this.
Speaker 2:I don't know absolutely um, let me do this right. We put the right passcode in here. So this is my Instagram with my it's endeavor reptiles on ig and you can see, if you see, all the different animals that I have. These are all pictures of animals that I I have so that I'm raised to be able to breed. Now what I'm going to start doing is I'm going to start posting pictures on here of of animals that I have um coming up for sale.
Speaker 2:Now you asked earlier about a website too. Um, I do. I was saying the best thing you can do is go to your local reptile expos and talk to a breeder, get to know a breeder, trust a breeder. Hopefully I can be that breeder and be able to sell you trusted, healthy, good, viable animals. But there's a more, a website called morph market, and that's where I got to know all of all of my friends in this industry. Um, this hobby is through, uh, morph market. Um, yep, and then this shirt that I have on here is a great resource too. These guys are fighting for reptile keepers. This is the united states association of reptile keepers, us arc. It's a huge lobbying group goes to washington that helps um fight bills. In each state there's a separate entity in Florida, because Florida is just. They're just trying to just kibosh you owning anything down there.
Speaker 1:And why do you think that? Why do you think that they don't want you to do what you're doing?
Speaker 2:I think down in Florida it's a little bit different, because the landscape is totally different than here. There's the Evergladesades, there's the temperatures, the humidity, there's there. It's like it's like ripe for picking for a lot of invasive species. That can, that can happen. Iguanas are invasive down there, burmese pythons are becoming invasive down there and they're killing a lot of the natural habitat that's there, so it can become a big, huge problem. So so they're trying to stop people from owning a lot of different species. Some of these are just, you know, like most regulators and most people that want to, you know, stop you from having fun in life and kill your dreams, you know, kill joys that are out there. There's a lot of crap, stupid, dumb crap that's out there that really should not be even brought to become a law.
Speaker 1:You know I don't have any specific examples that's right, we don't have to get into a lot of the politics about it. But I'm just. I was just kind of wondering you know, what are you up against when you know you go to washington and you, you know you fight something that they're trying to pass.
Speaker 2:When it comes to doing what you're doing, that's all us arc S ARC is looking at it in a logical way, in an ecological way, in a conservation way to say. We wanna conserve these animals for the future of our next generations to come, where these animals are gonna be able to be kept. You know the Eastern Indigo that we started out with the big black one. That's an endangered. It's on the threatened species list right now.
Speaker 1:I had special paperwork.
Speaker 2:There's propagation programs that they're using to be able to raise more, to be able to set out into the wild to try to get the population growth up. Unfortunately, florida is doing nothing but building homes and destroying all their habitat, so that's why they're on the threatened species list.
Speaker 1:Wow, what about insurance? I mean, do you have these snakes, these reptiles insured?
Speaker 2:Knock on wood. I do not.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm just kidding. You know, I don't know how that would work either, but as you go along, I'm sure you're going to. You know really.
Speaker 2:I asked my insurance girl about how do I go about insuring all my collection of snakes? And she goes ew, all my collection of snakes.
Speaker 1:And she goes ew, there's your answer. I guess she's not going to give you a policy. Never mind, I'm only kidding. I'm only kidding, so all right, let's go back. Did we see the snake that got you into all this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll show you her right now.
Speaker 1:I can't wait to see this. It's going to be cool and hopefully you're all enjoying this tonight. It's something a little bit different on Skip Happens. Don't forget to subscribe. Skip Happens is. I kind of get away. Every once in a while I make a turn and we're not talking about music and we're not talking about the musicians and the artists that we have with country music, but still, this is kind of cool. We got the podcast. Do whatever you want. Look at this. Oh my gosh, now how old.
Speaker 2:She's about three years old now.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Two and a half. She's about three years old.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, look at that. Just the design on her skin and the lines down her back.
Speaker 2:And their head stamps. There's stamp on their head.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:On most corn snakes. They're similar, but they also are different. Each snake is different.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm most, most corn snakes they're similar but they also are different. Within each each snake is different. But yeah, I saw this girl. She was um more of a burgundy, like reddish color, pink color when I when I she when she was real little, when she was small. Sometimes they do change. They get more vibrant. Sometimes, depending on the genetics, they get more like faded um. But this is a, a reverse okiti, and okiti is a locality of corn snake. It's found in a certain area. They call them Okotees. And then this is a reverse Okotee with just the bright red, yellow, orange colors. Wow. And then this is a Tessera and she is carrying for a Scal, for scaleless um, for scaleless babies wow but I bought her when she looked legit.
Speaker 2:She was the size of a pencil and that was, uh, that was it. So that's the girl that made me look at the genetics of everything and go, wait a minute, if I put this with that and I get this recessive gene and that incomplete dominant gene and I put those, those parents, together, this can happen and that can happen. And and, uh, you guys want to see a Western hog nose.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 2:All right, all right.
Speaker 1:Let's do it so cool.
Speaker 2:Western hog nose, I'll grab a big girl.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:So she thought I was second. You see her? Did you see me jerk my hand back?
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, Barely yes, I thought that was food.
Speaker 2:Hang on, she might think I'm food.
Speaker 1:All right.
Speaker 2:She's shedding. All right, let me grab this girl here. So Western hognose have a bunch of different puff-up, get-out-of, like, puff up, get out of my face, kind of attitude, kind of mechanisms. First they can puff up like, like, almost like a cobra. They can flatten out their, their necks and they'll still puff up their heads and they'll look like a cobra. Then they can hiss and they do a false strike. So this is a western hog nose, like a pig nose, western hog nose oh yeah, okay, I see how it got its name okay these guys are native to, um, the northeastern part of mexico, straight up through america into canada.
Speaker 2:That's where they're west, the western hog nose and there's eastern hog nose that goes all the way up in new jersey and down the east coast. But their second mechanism is, um, they like to false strike. So they're, they're, pretend they're a cobra and then they'll go, which freaks people out, just trying to scare you. It's not even like. It's not even like opening its mouth at all, it's just doing that kind of thing. The other mechanism that they do is they curl up in a ball, flip upside down, open their mouth, stick out their tongue and pretend they're dead like a possum.
Speaker 2:Smart oh yeah, so they're these guys. She's about a two and a half year old female. She did not breed for me this year I did not get any eggs from her this year but next year hoping to be able to get some babies from this one and I see the black on her bottom yep, yep and every.
Speaker 2:There's so many different morphs with this. There's let me grab my. Put her back and I'll grab a different one for you there's. There's albino, there's toffee belly, there's Swiss, there's all different kinds. These guys are not as smart as the other snakes. Let me tell you, these guys are pretty stupid. Might want to try to bite me actually.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I saw them trying to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, she's looking, but this is a lavender. I don't know if you can see the purple color in her.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a little bit.
Speaker 2:She's looking, and these guys have been known to bite uh, bite their own tails, to think that they're themselves or their own food. Like I came in one day and I had one that had like a good inch and a half, two inches of its own tail down his throat.
Speaker 1:Like they're not the sharpest, these are not the sharpest tools in the shed, let me tell you you think they would know, though, but just because you know they can't get it all like you say, they're not.
Speaker 2:Oriole, dinosaur brains and these things. These guys are not to evolve. I don't know how these guys stay alive in nature. Quite honestly, they're gorgeous, but they're not the sharpest. Like I said, they're not. They're no Eastern Indigo intelligence, put it that way then Just all different kinds colors, morph, morphs, patterns, designs.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:So, let me tell you real fast why I'm doing this stuff. Part of the reason why I'm doing it I see that. So Skip. You and I have known each other for a long long time During COVID. Can I even say it? Should I even say that word anymore?
Speaker 2:I don't know during covid um having my party rental business, my banquet hall, basically everything was closed. Everything was shut down. And I like to work, I like to progress, I like to make people happy. That that's why I do the entertainment to the entertainment world. I used to be a performer and during COVID, everything was closed. I came, I shut my building down March 16th, turn the water off and I left. I did not come back to this building until August. I drove by a few times, but I did not come back into this building until August. I drove by a few times, but I did not come back into this building until August, which is usually, I'm, slammed, slammed, busy, mm-hmm. I walked in and I saw my cotton candy machine sitting there, nobody having fun. I saw a bounce houses sitting there, nobody's having fun, my mechanical bull sitting there, not not not making people have fun. And even now I think about it. I start to get like a little bit teary-eyed and choked up about it, because it was mentally the worst time ever and I couldn't even be in this building. Like I came here and I saw this stuff and I literally broke down and I called my wife and I'm like I can't even be here right now. So I stayed at home all that summer and it wasn't until that fall of 2020 that I started to.
Speaker 2:I've always I've hunted. I've had animals my whole life. I had in fifth grade. We had a pet snake in fifth grade, my at the end of the year my teacher let me bring it home. Unfortunately it got away because a buddy came over when we were kids and left the tank open and I never saw him again. But I had fish tanks my whole life.
Speaker 2:I've had every kind of animal raised, baby animals, all kinds of stuff. You find something out in the wild, you raise them, which I don't agree with anymore. You shouldn't do that stuff because they're wild. They should stay wild. Um, that's a whole, nother, whole nother topic.
Speaker 2:But anyway, I I was on youtube watching people feed snakes and I was like, holy crap, maybe I used to have a snake, maybe there's a snake for sale. I went on Craigslist and I found a California king snake and I bought it and I kept it here at my place, at my shop here in Syracuse, kept it here because I wanted to be able to make myself have to come to this building and be here, and I came here and I would feed it Every couple of days I'd come check on it. I spent time with and be here and I came here and I would feed it. Every couple of days I'd come check on it. I spent that little thing and it was the first time in my life I really had time as an adult, not working, had time to sit and actually enjoy that, mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:I called my wife and I said this thing is like a therapy pad. Two hours went by and I'm just looking at this little tiny snake and I'm thinking, if this snake and I've, I've skydived, I've ridden choppers really, really fast, motorcycles I've shot the kind of pew pew you can think of, you know I've done. I've done a lot of things in my life.
Speaker 1:I know you have.
Speaker 2:And I thought, if I'm a full grown man at my age has done all these adrenaline life experiences and this little tiny thing is keeping me sane, like I just couldn't wait to come here to feed the thing it was, it was like it's. It's emotional right now. I know every time I tell the story I get emotional about it because covet messed my brain up, not being able to work you're not the only one, my friend no, I know I lost.
Speaker 2:I lost entertainment entertainer friends of mine that that that are no longer here because of that stuff. But I decided I'm gonna keep this little snake in my shop and I'm like I called my wife and I'm like this thing is like a therapy pet like. And I just started looking into the business side of things with. That's where my brain goes immediately to the business part of things and I'm looking at this like this is a massive, massive history that people don't even know. It's just, it's just starting and I'm looking at it business wise and I'm just looking at and I'm not looking and comparing myself to other people, but I'm looking at what can this do for me? Like how can I mentally be good helping someone else get a baby snake?
Speaker 2:The same way that snake did that for me as a grown adult man and hours went by and mentally helped me.
Speaker 2:How can I do that with, maybe a first pet? Maybe there's a kid getting bullied in school that goes home and sits there with their bearded dragon or their little, you know, corn snake or or a spouse that's being abused and when that abuser leaves, that spouse is there in a house and they have a pet snake that they can curl up with and just look at and hold and let the world go away. And that little tiny california king snake did that for me and I'm like it's my job, it's my duty as a human being now to to do this for other people. It's a business. I look at it as a financial aspect of it as well. Don't let me pretend that I don't, cause I absolutely do. But first and foremost, I want to create beautiful, gorgeous animals and get them in the hands of people that are going to love and care and take care of those animals, that are going to do the same kind of thing that that little snake did for me, for them absolutely wow that's.
Speaker 2:That's where I'm at now and, holy crap, I bought way more snakes than I ever could imagine it's like what happened.
Speaker 1:But you know, I mean, maybe, maybe you were meant to do this all along. I mean, I'm just, and covid changed. You know, whether it's you doing what you do, me doing what I do, both of us are more or less in the entertainment field um, it just. It just changed so much, everything that we did and everything that we do. For example, I mean this you know, before, covid, I had everybody in the studio here and I planned on having you here tonight, but, as you know, it didn't work out. There will be no snakes in my house.
Speaker 1:I go your house, I live there too, but you know, like the country music artist or anybody coming through would stop here at the house. Then, all of a sudden, all that stopped. It all stopped. We all had to look at things differently. You had to look at something differently you more than probably most, because of your investment in so many different things that you were doing, I mean, and now everything is like stopped, no business, no, nothing. It's like what the hell? What do I do? Where do I go? But this was therapy for you.
Speaker 2:Pretty cool With all my businesses. Yes, you have to think about money and dollars and cents. That's what a business, an entrepreneur, a business owner should do. But for the most part I really don't think about it all the time. I look at like, okay, well, I mean, I can't say how many jobs I go to, where I have no idea what the job is even booked for. But I want to make sure that that customer is taken care of.
Speaker 2:I might have booked that job, but I don't have that price, the dollar amount in my mind. I'm looking at I got to get this job taken care of, make this customer happy and at the end of the day there'll be time for counting. You know when there's no time for counting down the road. And I'm looking at the same this, this thing here as well. My, my, my main objective is get beautiful, gorgeous, healthy snakes in the hands of people that want to love and care and take care of these animals, and so these animals can take care of them as well. And if I can do that enough for enough people with with the proper genetics in some of these more higher ends then then the money art will just automatically happen nothing happens overnight.
Speaker 1:You're creating it, you're making it happen for you, just it'll work. It'll work and also I think we need to have some Endeavor Reptile t-shirts.
Speaker 2:I've got to come up with a logo.
Speaker 1:I'm looking at the shirt that you're wearing and you explained what that was all about, but I think, because who you are and what you're doing could also be another revenue for you.
Speaker 2:Well, I wish that I had some help. It frustrates me on a daily basis that we can't grow. I say we and everything because I want to be, but it's frustrating that everything can't grow exponentially all the time because of having lack of help.
Speaker 1:Right, no, I get you.
Speaker 2:This is not something where I'm just going to say, okay, I'll pay you by the hour, come in and clean snake poop. That's not what you do here. You know these, these animals are more than that. They should be treated like more than that, cause they are more than that. It's not just throw it in a tub and close the tub and ignore it for a week. You know if, if I heard a thing one time. A guy said he was, he was at a reptile, another breeders as well.
Speaker 2:I was listening to a reptile podcast and the guy said he was at a, a breeder's facility and he opened the tub and it had dirty water in it. And the guy closed the tub and he said aren't you gonna change that water? And he goes watch. I do water changes on saturday. And I heard that and I thought to myself every freaking day is saturday. Yeah, day needs to be saturday, it needs to be saturday.
Speaker 2:You know, like at some point, when my feet are killing me and I'm, I'm tacky and sticky enough and I can't stand anymore, I go home. But I'm here, spot checking, cleaning, feeding, like it's just. It's never. It's a never ending process. And now I have over 300 babies that hatched, which is another whole entire. Babies are so much harder to take care of to get them feeding, get them eating and and just keep tabs on them. So much more than the, than the adults. But at the end of the day, skip, it is an amazing process I've been doing for three years. I I'm excited for the next three years and the next three years, the next three years. The only thing I'm upset about is that I'm I'm basically 50 years old and I I wish I had. I wish I had started this 30 years before.
Speaker 1:Doesn't matter, you started, you're good to go. Brother, who cares what your age is? I'm a lot older than you.
Speaker 2:Well, I think you're never too old to start anything.
Speaker 1:That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:I just wish I had that 20, 30 years of knowledge. But I think I'm doing okay. I'm keeping my animals alive you sure are and we're going to have a lot of beautiful babies for sale coming up in the next couple of months.
Speaker 1:You know I want to thank you, virgil. I mean, this is something we had talked about. It was like let's do the podcast. I said, all right, great, let's do it and see where it goes. Obviously, this was very successful for me, for you Love it. I just I want to do this again. I want to get out there with you. I will gladly make you if we go to one of these shows. I'd love to have you come on and kind of co-host it with me, because you know what you're talking about. I'm just the guy behind a microphone. I think it'd be a great opportunity and also to educate the public. So that's what we do with podcasts as well, and it's just great conversation and it's a lot of fun. Thanks for doing this, dude.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Before we go, can I show you one more snake All right, all right, I'm here. All right, let me eat it.
Speaker 1:I love this, absolutely love this.
Speaker 2:Here he comes, the female. She's a little hungry all the time.
Speaker 1:Uh-oh.
Speaker 2:This is the male, holy cow, so this is a male that I did my homework online and I found that this guy over in Switzerland had this brand new recessive gene and he proved it out over like a six-year period of time to be its own recessive gene. And I contacted him and a year ago, november 8th, I imported from Switzerland three snakes and this is called a Swiss chocolate Western hognose. There's, I want to say probably, there's probably more obviously more now this year than there was last year. Last year at the time there was maybe only a couple dozen people in the whole country that had this recessive gene. This is an investment, an investment for the future, wow, of making a lot of really gorgeous, different babies. When you add this to an albino or add this to a lavender or an azanthic, it changes the pad, it changes the colors. So much, um, I'm just, I'm super excited to have a pair of swiss chocolate western hogs here with us that is very cool.
Speaker 1:Well, swiss chocolate, yeah, I like that. Do you um? When these are delivered, does the fedex guy know what's in the box?
Speaker 2:so they're kept at the hub. They're delivered directly straight from the plane to the hub.
Speaker 1:You have to go and pick them up.
Speaker 2:Correct. Yes, yep, and they're shipped with either heat packs or cool packs. There's a cryo pack that keeps the temperature kind of like a constant temperature. In there it turns from a liquid to a solid and absorbs it and gives off heat and coolness. So they're shipped overnight. Fedex overnight. I could drop off at 6 pm.
Speaker 2:this could be in in dallas by 9, 30 morning and they're kept up till we go pick them up. So this year he will be ready to breed. This year he did not really, uh, seem interested in any of the females this year. He's still young, but this next fall coming up he will be definitely be able to be bred this year coming up and then the female the following year. So this is a multi-year investment per animal. It's taken me three years so far. I won't even go into what's invested financially, but I've made $0.00 right now, but I'm super excited over the next couple of months to be able to start selling corns and western hogs.
Speaker 1:Awesome, I want to stop by there someday. You've got to give me a tour now.
Speaker 2:I mean, I realize, it's only one room, but I'd love to walk through there with you. Yeah, my babies are all in another part of the building, another whole. Yeah, I'm keeping all the babies separate from all the all the adults and the juveniles here so interesting, my friend.
Speaker 1:Thank you, I appreciate you appreciate you.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry, and one thing that I am sorry is that I did not get to show these to Zach in person.
Speaker 1:Zach, I don't know. You know he'd probably be fascinated, he really would.
Speaker 2:Well, I had a skin that's right, that's right. I was going to bring him a snake skin to have him check this out too.
Speaker 1:Hang on to that, because I'll definitely, we'll definitely somehow get it to him or show him. He thinks the world of you, so he knows you from you, know the magic and all that, yeah, so that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry I didn't get to see him and tell Nancy she's welcome here anytime as well.
Speaker 1:I'll let you tell her.
Speaker 2:Come on, Nancy. How can you be afraid of this little thing?
Speaker 1:Virgil, you're the best. You're the best, so cool. Thanks for coming on. Skip Happens, you're welcome, absolutely. It was just a great podcast, getting to find out what you're doing and showing off all your pride possessions these guys are probably precise uh possessions. I can't talk tonight. I don't know what's wrong. Headphones are throwing me off tonight, I don't know why I'm getting over a sinus infection.
Speaker 2:I thought I was.
Speaker 1:I thought I was gonna be able to talk at all no, you sound good, I'm just, I don't know what, what it is there's so many different species.
Speaker 2:I have a bunch more of other different species tonight. I only showed you like three or four or five well, we're gonna have to do this again then yeah there's madagascar cat eyes, kenyan sand boas. I do have some ball pythons. There's a lot of other really gorgeous, pretty species that people might want to check out as well. So but yeah, man, I appreciate you having me.
Speaker 1:This is right and everybody check it out. On instagram you can see all the snakes that he does, that virgil does have, and, uh, probably get more info if you need to. If you, depending on where you're watching this, it could be anywhere in the world. There you go. That's man to talk to you right there there On TikTok as well.
Speaker 2:Skip, it's under Virgil-EndeavorReptiles. On TikTok I do lives and I'll actually bring over one tub at a time. I clean feed, I show the feeding of the frozen thawed mice, I show each snake, like I'm doing now, and then I put it down and I go to the next tub. So you get to know cool stuff.
Speaker 1:Great idea, virgil, thanks. Thanks for watching everybody. Don't forget subscribe, to skip happens right there on YouTube. Appreciate it Dude.
