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Not-so-leaping lizard: What do you do when your gecko is suddenly sick?
By Tiffany Aron
The prospects for Halloween did not look good.
The 5-year-old leopard gecko was severely dehydrated and anemic. But it took a while for owner Sheena Otto to notice the little lizard was losing weight while her cage mate, Snakey, another female, was just getting fatter. A week later, Otto came home to find the sickly gecko almost completely still in her cage.
"It took me an hour and a half to feed her two worms," said Otto, a New York City resident. The poor lizard, it seemed, had lost all appetite.
Neither gecko had ever been to a vet, but now that the time had come for a visit, Otto found it nearly impossible to find one.
Reptiles and other exotics animals have become big business over the last 10 years, with more people keeping them as pets. Kingsnake.com, one of the most popular websites dedicated to reptiles, received more than 16 million hits a month last year. Big Apple Herpetological, the largest reptile supply store in the country, has seen a 20 percent increase in sales over the last five years.
But the vet industry has not grown with the rest of the country's appetite for exotics.
For all of New York City, just 12 vets are listed with the national Association of Reptile and Amphibian Vets, and just one is located in Otto's borough of Brooklyn, an area of the city with over 2.4 million residents.
In veterinary school, students are not required to study exotic animals except those working on a degree for zoo work. As a result, finding a vet who works exclusively on reptiles or exotic animals is a rarity, according to George Pisani, director of laboratories at the University of Kansas. Pisani also maintains the website for the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles, the largest international and professional society for herpetologists, or those who study reptiles and amphibians.
As a teenager, Pisani was interested in snakes and spent a lot of time at the Bronx Zoo talking with the herpetologist there to learn how to care for his own pets. Back then, he was "hard pressed" to find a vet who knew anything about reptiles. In 1964, when he was deciding on which graduate school to attend, there were only two herpetologists working in the Northeast -- one at Rutgers University in New Jersey and one at St. Bonaventure University in St. Bonaventure, N.Y.
"Twenty years ago, it was rare to treat reptiles in any way, shape or form," said Jeff Barringer, founder of Kingsnake.com. "If you got a vet who treated exotics, it was probably a cat or a bird."
In Austin, Texas, where Barringer lives with his three boa constrictors and Savannah monitor lizard, only six or seven vets are recognized as reptile specialists, out of 70 or 80 vets in the city. While another six or seven vets might be willing to try treating his pets, cats and dogs are their bread and butter.
Barringer, whose definition of an exotic animal is one that you can't buy food for at the grocery store, explained that interest in reptiles has grown immensely due to relaxed import laws and increased air travel. This has allowed people to acquire exotics from all corners of the world.
Great improvements have been made in knowledge of their lifecycles as well and what many have learned is that, because reptiles are fairly easy to care for, they make welcome pets, according to Pisani. "If you have a pet snake and want to take off for three days, cool," he said. "Take off and go."
But like any other animal on the planet, reptiles can still fall under the weather.
Otto kept her geckos supplied with the six live crickets, wax worms or pinky mice they craved every other day and even took to dusting the crickets with calcium powder, to make them more nutritious. She considered her efforts successful, as the geckos had never been sick since she bought them in 1997.
But when Halloween started to waste away, Otto was stuck. After working the yellow pages for days, she found just two vets, and one was a 40-minute subway ride away. Since geckos need to be kept at a balmy 80 degrees, making the trip in a New York February was not an option.
She eventually found a vet in Brooklyn who re-hydrated Halloween, gave her vitamin shots, and examined a fecal sample. The visit cost Otto $104 and the vet gave her the bad news: kidney failure.
Her beloved Halloween died four days later. Otto lined a small wooden box with leopard-print fabric left over from an old Halloween costume and laid the gecko inside. She took the box to Long Island, near her family's home, and buried her pet under a tree near a public lake.
Weeks later, she was still devastated by the loss, but didn't regret spending the money or the hassle she experienced finding a vet.
"She was going to die either way," said Otto. "But I did everything I could."
--Columbia
University Graduate School of Journalism
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