Pictures of pet lizards

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ABOUT HENRY AND THE LIZARD LOVER EXPERIENCE...

There is no intention to encourage anyone to seek out lizards/iguanas as pets. It's important for me to shrug off old stereotype views of lizards. Lizards have potential for good and intelligent behavior, it's all something to be recognized and admired in them. This does not mean it's time to run out and get a lizard for a pet, especially since so many of them will become horrible pets.

I've lived with particular lizards that demonstrated impressive behavior, such as calm, trust, memory of people, places, animals, cars, etc. And just like humans, I've seen various forms of egocentric and violent behavior, especially in iguanas.

Lizards are individuals, creatures that vary in significant ways from one and other, especially in sensitivity and temperament. They are individuals, so much like people, there are ones that naturally become very calm and civil while others are overwhelmed with fear and have difficult behaviors, no matter how well you raise or treat them, that they have various forms of intelligence, have all kinds of body language, human like behavior, human like character and ego, that they truly want to live and enjoy being alive and basking in the sunshine just like people. BUT, as pets, iguanas are a big gamble to get involved with. They get too large for most people to deal with. Iguanas, that is the male iguanas, also pose a possibility of getting into serious aggressive breeding season moods once they grow up and there's NO way of preventing that behavior, no way of knowing ahead of time whether your iguana that you raise will or will not develop a serious attack mood and change from being sweet pet to raging bull.

I've always had the company of various pets like birds, rodents, cats, dogs, turtles and lizards since I was a young kid but it was not until I got a bit older when I eventually encountered some particularly wonderful iguanas with such impressive character and behavior that it would awaken in me a new appreciation and understanding of lizards and animals in general. The year was 1982, I entered a new phase and focus just on lizards, and started to collect large groups of iguanas and other lizards in my home. Prior to that, I was already raising 3 Chinese Water Dragon lizards. They had developed very calm and fearless behavior which impressed me at the time, so yes, I decided to go all the way to having a house full of lizards by collecting iguanas, to keep in my home as pets and eventually as subjects for a photographic project I wanted to do, which later became the images I would use on a line of post cards and greeting cards. I had plenty of room in my house and garage and the time was right.

This was all long before the iguana fad and frenzy of the 1990's, when iguanas were not popular pets and very little was written about them and long before the obsessive trend to make iguana diet and care into a rocket science on the internet, (more on all this on an upcoming page).

Early on when I started collecting iguanas, I got all the vital but SIMPLE tips and basic principles that covered iguana diet, health problems and general care from a wise older veterinarian, DVM Clyde Pitts of the Studio City Animal Hospital, (around 1983). DVM Pitts briefed me 1) on the all-important role of providing occasional...