While snakes are passive and rather expressionless beasts, lizards can display considerable intelligence and character. One such reptile we had was a mastigure, which I christened Dandy, owing to his great partiality for dandelion flowers. One must, I think, face the fact that mastigures are not the most attractive of lizards, and Dandy was a particularly unattractive member of his species. Nevertheless, his eager personality made him a likeable creature. He had a blunt, rounded head; a fat, flattened body; and a heavy tail covered with short, sharp spikes. His neck was rather long and thin, and this made him look as though he had been put together out of bits of two totally unrelated species. His colour could be described only as a rich, dirty brown. Dandy’s liking for dandelion flowers amounted to an obsession. He had only to see you approaching the reptile house with something yellow in your hands, and he would immediately rush to the front of his cage and scrabble wildly against the glass. If it was a dandelion you were carrying, you had only to slide back the glass front of his cage and he would gallop out onto your arm, panting with emotion; then, closing his eyes, he would stretch out his long neck and, like a child waiting to have a chocolate popped into its mouth, would open his jaws. If you pushed the flower into his mouth he would munch away in ecstasy, the petals dangling outside his mouth and making him look as though he had a bright yellow military moustache.
Dandy was the only lizard I have known that would genuinely play with you. If he was lying on the sand, and you let your hand creep slowly towards him, as though you were stalking him, he would watch you, his eyes bright, his head on one side. As soon as you were close enough, he would suddenly whip his tail round, give you a gentle bang on the hand with it, and then scuttle away to a new position; you were then expected to repeat the whole performance. That this was real play I have no doubt, for the blows he dealt you with his tail were very gentle, whereas I have seen him bash another lizard with it and not only send it flying but draw blood.
Not long after we got Dandy, we had trouble with teguexins. These are large, handsome, and very intelligent lizards from South America. They can grow to about three and a half feet in length, and their skin is beautifully patterned in yellow and black. They are quick-witted, belligerent creatures, and the female we had was quite the most vicious in the reptile house. Tegus, as they are called for short, have three methods of attack, all of which they employ—together or separately—cheerfully and without any provocation. They will either bite, scratch with their well-developed claws, or lash you with their tails. Our female preferred to start hostilities with her tail. As you opened her cage she would regard you with obvious dislike and mistrust, inflate her throat and start to hiss, and at the same time curve her body into a half-moon shape like a bow. Once your hand came near enough, she would suddenly straighten out, and her tail would lash round like a stock whip. If she found that this method of defence did not deter you, she would run forward and try to grab you with her mouth. If she succeeded, she would hang on with the tenacity of a bulldog, at the same time bringing up reinforcements in the shape of her sharp, curved hind claws, which could tear chunks off you. I did not think this tegu’s character was an exception. After a fair amount of experience with tegus in their natural state, I had come to the conclusion that they were by far the most evilly disposed of the lizards, and were, moreover, so fast and intelligent that they were a force to be reckoned with when in captivity.
We were always suffering at the hands, or rather the tail, of our female tegu, and so it was with somewhat mixed feelings that we discovered her lying dead in her cage one morning. I was puzzled by her sudden death, for she had appeared to be in the very pink of fighting condition, having bitten me vigorously only a couple of days before. So I decided to do a rough post-mortem and try to find a clue to the cause. To my astonishment, on opening the stomach, I found a huge mass of whitish substance, not unlike fish roe, which I took to be a gigantic growth of some sort. Wanting to find out about this mysterious growth, I shipped the body off for a more detailed and expert post-mortem, and awaited the results with interest. Finally they came through. They were terse and to the point: the mass of white substance had been not a growth but a large quantity of pure fat. The lizard had died of heart trouble brought on by this fatty condition, and it was suggested that we feed less abundantly in future. On reflection, it was plain, for in the wild state tegus are very active creatures. Therefore, if you confine them in a limited area and give them a rich and continual food supply, they are bound to become over-fat. I vowed that the next tegu we obtained would be treated very differently.
Our chance came not long afterwards, when a dealer offered us a pair. On arrival they turned out to be wonderful specimens, well-marked and with glossy skins—the male with a great, heavy head and fleshy jowls; the female with a longer, more slender head. Contrary to our expectations they did not prove to be typical tegus at all. Instead of being fierce and unhandleable, they were as tame as kittens, and liked nothing so much as to lie in your arms, being gently rocked, and drowse off to sleep. If you went and stood by their cage, they would make the most frantic and flattering efforts to climb through the glass and into your arms. Apart from these bursts of social activity, they showed little desire to do anything much, except to lie around in abandoned attitudes, gazing benignly at any human beings who happened to be around in the reptile house.
As a result of all this feverish activity, of course, they grew fatter and fatter, and, viewing their increasing girth with alarm, we decided that something would have to be done, or we would have another couple of heart failures on our hands. The answer was exercise; so every morning Shep would let them both out to wander round the reptile house while he did his work. To begin with—for the first two or three days—this worked like a charm, and the tegus, breathing heavily, pottered about the floor for a couple of hours each morning. Then, however, they discovered that by climbing over a low barrier they could get into the tortoise pen, over which hung an infrared light. So each morning when they were let out, they would rush short-windedly over to the tortoise pen, climb in, and settle themselves under the infra-red light and go to sleep. The only answer to this was to cut down on their food, and consequently they were dieted as rigorously as a couple of dowager duchesses at a health resort. Needless to say, they took a very poor view of this, and would gaze plaintively through the glass as they watched the other inmates of the reptile house enjoying such delicacies as raw egg, mincemeat, dead rats, and chopped fruit. We hardened our hearts, though, and continued with the diet, and within a very short time they had regained their sylph-like figures, and were much more active as a result. Now we let them eat what they like, but at the least sign of corpulence back they will go to the diet until their size is respectable again.
The one reptile-house inhabitant that never seemed to become overweight, no matter how much he ate, was our dragon, known as George. He was a Guiana dragon, a rather rare and interesting kind of lizard from the northern parts of South America. They measure about two feet six inches in length, and have large, heavy heads with big, dark, intelligent eyes. The body and tail are very crocodile-like in appearance, the tail being heavily armoured and flattened on top, whereas the back is covered with heavy scales which are bean-shaped and protrude above the surface of the skin. The colouring is a warm rusty brown, fading to yellowish on the face. They are slow, thoughtful, and attractive lizards, and George had a very mild and likeable character.
Probably one of the most remarkable things about Guiana dragons are their feeding habits. Before George arrived we had read up all we could on the species, but none of the textbooks were very helpful. However, they seemed to be perfectly normal lizard-type creatures, and so we thought that their diet would be similar to that of any large carniverous lizard. When George arrived he was petted, admired, and placed reverently in a large cage prepared for him, with a special pond of his own. This amenity he appeared to appreciate fully, for the moment he was released into his quarters he made straight for the pond and plunged in. He spent half an hour or so squatting in the water, occasionally ducking his head beneath the surface for a few minutes at a time and peering thoughtfully about the bottom of the pond. That evening we gave him a dead rat, which he regarded with considerable loathing. Then we tried him on a young chicken with the same result. Fish he retreated from as if it were some deadly poison, and we were in despair, for we could think of nothing else that he might like.