- Oh!
Okay, so listen, guys.
I'm gonna get into the mind
of some of these reptiles today,
and talk to you about things like their behavior
and stuff like that.
I've had a bunch of people say,
what do I do when I have a snake that's a little aggressive
and I can't hold it?
I wanna hold it.
Well, the fact is that snakes really aren't aggressive,
they're defensive.
Take for instance Lucky here.
He's actually a defensive animal,
and I'm not gonna talk to you a ton about Lucky,
other than the fact that I'm gonna show you
how I handle something like this
that can help you in handling your snake.
But I'm talking more about Ball pythons,
maybe a pet snake.
These aren't really pet snakes, typically.
But what I wanna do is I wanna distract them
and then get them from the backside, right?
You never wanna go face first into a snake,
especially a snake that is defensive like Lucky.
If you get it from the back,
you can actually handle it and see, I didn't even get bit.
Now I can kind of get him preoccupied over here
to where he doesn't look at my face
and he's striking this way.
It's just a matter of trying to get into the head
and the behavior of the actual animal itself.
And that's the way that you can actually
not get bitten by snakes, but at least most of the time.
Every now and then, even I make mistakes and get bitten
and that fact is.
But it's more about your pet snake
not really an Amazon tree boa
that don't really make that great of pets.
So now let's get onto say you have a Piebald Ball python,
and then this one is actually in a rack,
but let's say it's in an enclosure in your house
and stuff like that.
And let's say when you go like this,
it gets a little bit defensive.
Now this one isn't at all.
But what you wanna do again is pick it up from the back
away from the head, and then you're gonna avoid
any strikes and stuff like that.
And oftentimes once an animal gets up,
even sometimes it'll be a little defensive too.
You gotta remember.
We wanna get into snakes heads, right?
We wanna think like a reptile.
And when you think like a reptile
and you can see this guy starting to come out,
and if I got close enough, it would actually probably...
See that?
I knew it was gonna strike, right?
But again, now if you actually have this animal
and you start getting scared of it and you're like,
oh my gosh, look at the snake, it's striking.
I better put it down.
Oh my gosh.
Now what is that telling the snake, right?
It's telling the snake that I'm afraid of this person,
and the way I can get him or her to set me down
is to strike.
So again, now I'm gonna pick it up from the back again.
Now I'm gonna continue to hold this animal.
I'm gonna try to make this
a good experience for the snake, right?
I'm gonna try to keep it moving
so that it doesn't get defensive.
I've gotta build up the fact
that it isn't afraid of me, right?
'Cause it's just defensive.
You gotta remember, it's a little snake in a big world.
And to them, they're looking at you
as like a potential predator, right?
Oh my God, this guy's gonna eat me or something like that.
So what you have to do is slowly build
those threads of trust.
What you don't wanna do is put that snake back
after it strikes at you, because then it tells that snake
that all I have to do is strike
and he's gonna set me down, right?
So again, make sure that when you do set it down,
the last thing you wanna do is make sure
it's not striking at you and set it down like this.
And then just have that end result be a good result.
That way you're starting to build
the threads of confidence in the animal itself.
Like, wait a second, that wasn't that bad of an experience.
And you gotta continue that on over and over again.
And again, the last thing you wanna do
is be afraid of your animal.
You don't want it afraid of you,
and you certainly don't wanna be afraid of it.
So if for some reason, you pick up an animal
and it just like is striking
and you just can't get over the fear,
I promise you when you have a little ball Python
or a corn snake, even if it bites,
it's not even gonna hurt.
Even this Hypo Burmese, Penelope, at this size,
if it bit me, it really wouldn't hurt,
but I understand snake bites are kind of scary to people
and I get it.
You can always wear some like little leather gloves
or something like that.
That way you feel protected, right?
And you start to gain those confidence.
And I'm telling you, we have taken so many reptiles
that have been super, super defensive
and striking, and striking, and striking.
And we just held them and held them and held them
and gain those threads of trust.
Make them realize that we're not bad,
that we're not dangerous.
They don't have to be afraid of us
and be defensive against us.
And once you get past that,
they become absolutely amazing animals.
So again, my advice to you is don't put that snake down
if it's striking at you.
Put it down when it stops striking at you.
The same goes when it comes to lizards.
I mean, look at what Bruce has done with baby Kush here.
I mean, you remember when baby Kush first came?
It was like ridiculous.
And I mean, it literally just wanted to destroy us.
And you can see now that, you know,
it's slowly getting better and better, you know?
Now again, it's still in progress now,
but, you know, you could see that Bruce can come in here.
He can put his hands in.
Baby Kush starts thinking, because again,
now he's not afraid of Bruce, right?
It's actually creating a relationship.
And then all of these experiences
that Bruce is doing with him
are creating those, again,
those threads of like trust between them.
And now you can see, look at him,
he'll just pick them straight up like that.
Again, no way in the world we could have done that
just six months ago because he was just crazy.
Now baby Kush does have some dagger
when it comes to actual nails, but you can see,
look at how amazing this guy is right here.
And look at that animal right there.
I mean, is that absolutely incredible?
I'm telling you what?
Those claws are ridiculous.
I mean, he literally, he just literally touched me
one second and it just goes right in.
But look at how far he's come.
And the way that that's happened is again,
Bruce here has just spent hours and hours and hours
of habituating him.
And look at this, he'll just come right over,
pat him on the chin, and again,
he's always a little bit defensive,
but nothing like he used to be.
And that's just time.
That's lots of time and time and effort.
I mean, it's amazing.
And you could do the same thing again,
whether that comes to a lizard,
a snake or whatever the case is.
I mean, it's amazing how far baby Kush has come.
I mean, just look at this animal right there.
It's absolutely incredible.
But boy, I tell you what?
Handling that thing, that is a tree dragon right there.
He's bleeding, I'm bleeding.
That's from his nails and that's not,
again, aggression whatsoever.
That's just him hanging on.
That is an amazing animal.
You could see how far you can take an animal's behavior
just through those threads of confidence that they get.
The more confident they get, the less defensive they get.
And certainly, there's no better example even with Elvis.
Now when we got Elvis,
it wasn't that he was aggressive at all,
but he was definitely a little nervous around people.
For whatever reason,
he just was a little bit afraid of people
to be totally honest with you.
And now, you know, you can see.
Just look at this guy.
I mean, he's just like hanging out on me
like he's a puppy dog or something like that.
And again, I think it's just breaking that whole thing down
into a situation where you think about it
on the simplest level, right?
Like what are these animals thinking
and how can we get them to think the way
we want them to think, you know?
And basically that is just, again, gain confidence.
The more confident they are,
the less afraid they are of you.
And the more confident you are of keeping them,
the better it's gonna be,
and then you have an animal like Elvis here
that is literally more like a puppy dog
than he is a reptile.
He just actually is crazy.
I love this little dude right now.
And I hope this helps you on your journey
of loving reptiles and learning that your reptile
can be way more than you ever thought it could be
if you can open up how beautiful they actually are.
What are you doing, Elvis?
You just hanging out with me, buddy?
I tell you what, when you get experiences like this, guys,
it's next level.
And I know you can all have them as well.
I mean, it's just absolutely wonderful.
Back at you guys with my friends over at Raycon.
You guys know that I've been working with these guys
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and I've been wearing these Raycons
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And I literally use them every day.
Every morning I listen to music.
I often listen to podcasts when I'm working.
I'll listen to inspirational books and stuff like that.
And now with the holiday season here,
it's a great gift idea.
Last year, I gave Raycons to a bunch of my family,
and they still are using them every single day to this day.
So this year, there's no doubt more people
on my Christmas list are gonna be getting Ray Cons.
And Raycons always improving now with their new ear tips.
They're actually more comfortable.
The fit is even better.
I mean, you know, they're amazing.
I mean, you don't even feel them in your ear.
And you know, I do a lot of phone calls
throughout the day too.
So now with their one-touch answer feature
with the internal microphone,
you could take phone calls as well.
You know, if you're doing your business and stuff like that,
it's just nice to be wireless and hands-free
especially with a life like mine.
I'll be working with animals
and I can't have a phone to my ear.
And it's crazy that Raycon earbuds
can actually have eight hours of play times
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And then with this awesome carry case,
you've got 32 hours before you have to plug them in.
That is a lot of time,
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And we use the same kind of technique
when it comes to breeding snakes, right?
I try to simplify things and I try to break them down
to the most common easy way to figure out
how to be successful when you're actually
breeding an animal.
So take for instance this pied ball python
This is a female that she's about 1,550 grams right now.
She could be fatter.
She could be 1,700 grams.
But what we do is we actually maintain feed them
over the summer.
That's much like what would happen
over in West Africa, Ghana, Togo, and Benin.
There's gonna be periods of time
where there's lots of food during the wet season,
the monsoon season, and then during the dry season,
food is gonna be a little bit sparse.
And that's one of the reasons why ball pythons nuts
go off of food, right?
So when your ball python stops feeding,
it's a natural thing, right?
It's not like something wrong with the animal.
In the wild for thousands and thousands of years,
these animals have been binge feeders
where they feed a lot when there's a lot of food,
and then when there's hardly any food,
they go on strikes because there's just not food available.
With that being said, we kind of simulate
that same thing in captivity.
And what we wanna do is maintain feed them
during the summertime,
and then when it gets to the fall
right before breeding season,
which essentially is like the monsoon season
over in West Africa, we start really increasing that food.
And this is two things.
This simulates what happens in the wild, number one,
and number two, think about it.
Let's just break it down simply, right?
If you're a female ball python,
are you gonna produce babies
if you know there's not food available, right?
If you have a little amount of food
or just enough food to survive,
you're probably not gonna want your babies
to hatch out and actually perish
because there's not food available.
But if that food could increase tremendously
just before breeding season,
that sends that signal to that female like,
oh my gosh, there's an abundance of food.
I can now have babies.
My babies are gonna thrive
because there's an abundance of food, right?
So we're trying to get in the snake's mind,
think what they think, and actually use that to our benefit.
Not only in handling it as a pet,
but also from a breeding standpoint for it to be successful.
And that's why we typically have
such a high percentage of production
when it comes to all of our animals
is we do food cycles, as much as we do temperature cycles.
It's all about the psychology of the actual snake itself.
- Today, we're gonna feed monitor mush to Toothless,
and he looks super ready.
So let's just offer it to him.
He's really, really well trained now.
So we're just gonna offer this to him.
Let's see what he does.
That's a cup.
It's almost my hand.
Look at him destroying it.
Fantastic.
I feel like he's honestly doubled in size
since I've been here.
And I've been here almost a year now.
Wow, that's crazy.
He's just getting so big.
He's such a good boy though.
Man, he's destroying it.
I think that Toothless is also the one animal
that doesn't care how close to his face
you get with the camera.
Like, I still get weirded out when you get like that.
It's just crazy.
He's been getting filmed since he was a baby.
There should be one of those like behind the scenes
where like I have the other camera showing you
how close you actually are.
You're doing so good, Toothy.
Keep going, buddy.
- I'm excited about this, guys.
I'm gonna put a link right in the description right here,
and you can actually join Reptile Army's Discord.
That's right.
Tons of cool things on this Discord.
You just click that link.
It's the invite.
You can join and come hang out with us.
I mean, I'll be hanging out there.
It's gonna be so much stuff coming up on this Discord.
You definitely wanna be a part of it.
So go ahead, link in the description.
- All right, guys.
You see what I got here?
This is used for...
You don't wanna know.
But we're gonna use it to check on our tarantula
that recently buried itself.
Okay, come look.
Have you seen, Mike?
Have you seen this, Mike?
I don't know the species name, but look at it.
I'm gonna open it up here,
and you see that mound in the back right there?
It recently built a home.
It built itself a home.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna check on it
'cause I've been wanting to see what it's doing.
Bruce says it may be molting.
Let's power up.
Oh!
Okay, we're gonna stick it in there.
Hopefully not get attacked, but at the same time...
- Just letting you know that right now.
- [Man] Oh my God.
This is...
- No. I'm scared, dude.
- [Mike] Oh wait, what is that?
That's his web.
- [Man] Oh my God.
- As soon as you touch the web, its gonna jump out.
- [Man] Oh, did you see it's leg?
Did you see it's leg, dude?
Oh my God.
- You're shaking as bad as I am.
- [Man] I can't stop shaking.
This is like prehistoric paranormal activity.
Look at me shaking. - I'm shaking too.
- Look at the camera angle.
- Just stick it through the web.
Oh, that's his face right there.
- Wow.
Oh, oh, I'm close.
Do you guys see that?
- I think that was the molt and not the tarantula.
- Wow.
Okay, so that was the main entrance.
We're gonna go through the exit, all right?
' Cause I think that can be a better shot.
Wow.
This is getting the adrenaline going.
The exit is where this leaf is.
I'm telling you,
this is the coolest thing though with tarantulas.
It did this hole.
We didn't do this.
- Time to go take my pills.
I'm getting old.
That's iTunes pills app.
So the entrance point, that was the face.
Why are we going in at the butt?
- We don't know.
What the hell was that?
- Sounds kinda creepy staring over your shoulder.
- Oh, you see his butt?
Dude, you see that butt?
- See how it's bald?
That's 'cause it kicks hairs all the time.
And she might actually be ready to molt too.
- And that's why we think it buried itself.
Oh, it just kicked hairs at us.
It's not happy. We're done.
- I think I felt it.
I'm gonna die.
- Oh no.
All right, Mike. You're next.
- [Mike] Don't touch me with that.
- And I hope this kind of helped you
if you're having any issues with your snake,
or lizard, or whatever the case may be.
I just wanted to kind of tell you how I think about things.
Now, I hope that you enjoyed it.
If you did, do me a favor.
Right over here is a playlist.
You can watch a couple other videos.
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hit that subscription button right over here.
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Have an absolutely wonderful day, Reptile Army.
Remember, be kind to someone
and I promise, I'll see you in the next one.