- Hey, good morning everybody, and welcome to the vlog.
I hope the start of your day is absolutely incredible.
You know, tons of people are always asking me,
"How do I start when it comes to working with animals?"
Maybe you guys that are watching are thinking like,
"Man, I want to follow that dream as well,
"to be able to work with animals every day."
It really is amazing,
and maybe that's something you wanna do,
so I'm gonna talk about a little bit in this vlog,
and of course, the way I started was breeding snakes.
And there's no doubt that breeding snakes
has been amazing for me, right?
I've done it for like 32 years,
and it doesn't matter what you start with, you know,
you could breed ball pythons,
you can breed corn snakes, geckos, whatever the case may be,
whatever you're passionate about,
you could certainly go down that path,
but the only issue is is that when I started,
it was just a new business,
so the opportunity was much greater.
Now, there's a lot of competition out there
when it comes to breeding snakes.
That's not to say that you shouldn't do it,
it just says that there's a lot of competition,
so it's gonna take time, it's gonna take patience,
unfortunately, it's gonna take some investment as well.
My advice to you is to just work
with the things that you absolutely love.
Take this amazing little ball python here.
You know, the truth is, when I started working
with ball pythons way back in the '80s,
people thought that they were junk animals, right,
because all that came in
was wild-caught adults that didn't do well
and no one wanted to work with them!
I worked with them because I love them, my point is,
don't chase projects because you think you're gonna get rich
or you're doing it for the money,
work with the animals that you really love,
even if necessarily they aren't
that sought after at that point.
You gotta remember,
take for instance mangrove snakes, right?
Wild-caught ones come in for like 75 dollars,
but people will pay up to $500 for a captive-born,
so it doesn't have to be an expensive animal
or chasing money.
I think that's the worst thing you could ever do
is actually chase projects, because trust me,
patience is a big part of success
when you're breeding reptiles,
and hoo doggy, this monkey is upset!
But certainly, breeding reptiles
isn't the only thing you could do
if you want to work with reptiles, and again,
I'm really talking about reptiles for a living.
Animals are kinda the same type of thing, in a way,
when it comes to mammals and stuff like that,
but the truth is, breeding reptiles is a great option,
there's no doubt about it,
it's just, you know, there's no one way to do it, right?
There's a million ways you can be successful,
but the truth is that there's many other ways
you can work with animals too.
I'm gonna be totally honest with you, when I was a kid,
I didn't grow up thinking I was gonna breed snakes
for a living because again,
there was no professional snake breeders at the time.
What I really wanted to do was work at a zoo.
That's right, my whole dream when I was a kid
was to be a zookeeper,
and that's probably why I love zoos so much.
And in a way, now I do work at a zoo, I own a zoo, right?
It's not the biggest zoo,
but it's a great place that I love to death,
and I get to do all those things
that I wanted to do working for a big zoo,
but I get to do it here at the Reptarium.
But don't get me wrong,
I realize that most people can't just afford
to open up a place like the Reptarium,
after all, it did cost a lot of money, but the truth is,
you can start working towards that goal, right?
You can be a zookeeper at another zoo
and eventually open up your own place if you wanted to,
or just get a job at a zoo, I mean,
listen, most zookeepers don't make a ton of money,
but it is an awesome job!
I mean, to be able to be around animals, whatever it is,
if you like reptiles you can work at the reptile house,
if you like mammals you can work at that thing.
The only downside is is that there's not a lot
of opportunity for zookeepers out there.
I mean, most zoos kinda don't have openings, right?
When someone becomes a zookeeper,
they love the job so much they work there until they retire,
so a lot of jobs aren't open,
so don't put all your eggs in the zookeeping basket,
because it's kinda hard to get in.
But once you do, it's absolutely amazing,
so that's another option if you want to work with animals.
And I'm just throwing out a bunch of ideas,
as a matter of fact, do me a favor down in the comments,
let me know what you think is a great option
if you want to work with animals.
I'm just kinda throwing out whatever I can think.
One of the things that, as a bio major myself, is science,
I mean, you can get into the science side of things.
You could do field research,
you can get into all kind of grant situations,
work with conservation, all those types of things,
that's a great option.
It's a little hard because again,
there's not a lot of money out there
for those types of projects,
but if it's something that you're really passionate about,
it's another opportunity to surround yourself with wildlife.
Certainly another thing you can do
is you can get into film and photography.
On the film side, you've got all these production companies
that are going around the world, like Nat Geo,
and BBC "Planet Earth", or YouTube for that matter,
everyone always needs a camera guy.
And of course, then there's photography,
like my guy Jay here,
that does both videography and photography.
As a matter of fact,
today we have to make some stickers, right?
- Yeah, we actually have to go through,
we have some stickers already over here,
and the rest we have to go through and make,
so we're gonna do like Toothless and we're gonna go do Elvis
and a bunch of the other animals
so that we could have a bunch more on there.
- Exactly, so we need really high resolution great pictures
so we can make stickers,
but there's a whole bunch of things you could do
from photography as well.
As a matter of fact Jay is doing a contest over
on his Instagram,
link in the description, follow him right here,
and when you hit 5,000, right?
- Yep, I hit 5,000 and what I'm gonna do is,
whoever wins the contest, we'll randomly select it,
and whoever wins will actually get
to pick any animal in the Reptarium,
and I'll personally photograph that animal,
and then me and Brian are gonna sign it,
and we're gonna send it off to you free of charge.
- So go ahead, give him a follow,
when we hit 5,000 over on his account on Instagram,
you guys have a chance to win an animal of your choosing.
In the meantime, we're gonna set up over here,
and we're gonna walk you through
how to take good pictures of reptiles,
so I hope that you amateur photographers
are gonna enjoy this segment.
All right, so we have everything that we need here,
we have lights, we have cameras, lenses,
we have stands, we have a backdrop in this box over here,
I'm gonna go ahead and let Jay set this all up
and let him do his magic and I'm gonna take a little break
while he's working hard, you know what I mean?
(upbeat electronic music)
And we are all set up, we've got our backdrop,
we've got our camera, we've got lighting,
all that type of stuff, so we're gonna go ahead,
get our first victim, our animal, start taking pictures,
and I'll actually have Jay kind of explain
what he's thinking for you guys
that want to take good pictures,
he can tell you what his procedure is to take amazing shots.
All right, so the first animal we're gonna actually
be taking pictures of that will eventually be stickers
is Nova, the frilled dragon.
So just walk the people through, like, how do cameras work?
- Awesome, so cameras work by using three different elements
to gain an exposure, right?
So exposure is like, how much light is available in a scene.
So in a dark room, there's less exposure,
on a bright sunny day, there's a lot of exposure.
The three things that we're using are shutter speed,
which is pretty much how quickly the shutter
of the camera closes.
Then we have aperture, which is this iris of your camera,
so it's a little thing that opens up like your pupil
and dilates to the amount of light.
And then the last one is ISO,
which is pretty much a volume knob,
so it's a gain, it's digital gain,
which allows you to get a higher exposure,
but what the caveat is is that you end up getting more noise
in the photo so it looks all pixelated and gross,
and we don't want that.
So you want the lowest ISO,
you want shutter speed
that's not going to cause motion blur,
because we want everything to be pin sharp,
and then your f-stop you want to be around f/8 or f/11,
which is going to give us the most amount of depth of field,
which is focus from front to back,
so that Nova's little cute nose will be in focus
as well as the back of him, too.
- [Brian] All right, let's do it.
- So, what I'm going to be shooting
at right now is I'm at f/8,
so I'm gonna be shooting at f/8, ISO 1,600,
and shutter speed at 1/125 of a second.
This is gonna ensure that my photo comes out sharp,
and I'm gonna check the focus
to make sure that we're all good.
I'll zoom in here, you can see right on his eyes, pin sharp.
- So what we're gonna do is literally take about
eight or 10 pictures of this, and again,
for those of you guys who are aspiring to be photographers,
wildlife photographers, you could be selling your prints,
you could be licensing your stuff out
to other networks or broadcasters, whatever the case is,
so this is a really good thing.
So we'll just have fun shooting a bunch of animals
and see what happens,
so far it's looking pretty good.
(upbeat electronic music)
Next up is my boy Potato over here,
and compositionally he's going to be an easy one,
because he doesn't really move much,
and Jay just has to find the right perfect stop for that.
We do have some challenging ones,
and there's no doubt when you're doing wildlife photography,
whether it's in captivity or out in the wild,
one of the biggest challenges
is capturing exactly what you want, right?
I mean, composition is huge.
- Yeah, composition is honestly the biggest thing,
I mean, if your lighting's right, all that stuff,
if you don't have composition, that's what makes the photo.
So what I'm trying to do is line it up
so that there's some kind of curvature to his body,
which will pretty much lead people looking through,
rather than just a flat, two-dimensional image.
(upbeat electronic music)
- And course our last victim was Elvis here.
Okay, so Jay, what's next?
- So, now I bring these in to a computer,
I'm gonna get them uploaded, clean up any imperfections,
through PhotoShop, Clone Stamp and stuff,
and then I'm going to send them over to Lory
so she can get them printed out into stickers,
which is awesome.
For real, if you guys have any questions
on photos, or videos, or cameras,
or what editing software I use and stuff,
please come over to my Instagram, it's @jaytomsky,
we'll put a link down here somewhere,
and I'll answer any questions you guys have.
- Certainly animal behavior is another thing that happens,
and that kind of fits in to the zookeeper category,
and maybe all the categories, to be honest with you,
but here we all work on training these animals
and getting them habituated so that everyone
that comes into the Reptarium is really safe,
but certainly Bruce is kind of my go to, you know?
He really has a history
of training dogs and stuff like that,
and he's brought the same type of mentality to that
into the reptiles,
and he definitely has a passion for it.
- I'm actually about to start feeding Elvis here,
so it's actually really great
that we started actually doing this with him,
because it creates not only a really great experience
for kids that come here,
but also actually creates a relationship with us.
Every time I get Elvis out, I always pull him out,
I hold him, I do all sorts of other things,
but when it comes down to the ball training,
this is his bread and butter, he is amazing with it.
Let's see if I can get him to get excited.
You hungry? There you go, there you go.
There you go, come on, this way, this way.
Touch it? Good boy.
As you guys saw, he doesn't even care about the food,
almost like he completely ignores it, goes like,
"Where's the ball at? Where's that gonna be?"
and every time we always feed him,
I mean look at this ball, look at it, isn't that crazy?
He bites it all the time.
This way, go on. Good boy, good boy.
There you go, good, good!
Now, consistency is everything with these guys,
just like Brian was saying, with dogs,
as long as things sorta...
The same way military style went,
everything was strict, everything was right on us,
and everything was really consistent,
now that we do that with him, he's just like a dog, almost,
and that's why we always make that joke all the time,
that he is just like our own little pet dinosaur.
So not only is this great enrichment for him,
but this is even more great safety for us.
Every single time I pull this blue ball,
he knows this means food,
but the moment I put it up, I can pet him all day,
and it's just that easy guys, it's awesome.
Just like a big baby, come on, girl, there you go!
It was not that long ago where
there was no way I could have done this, no way at all,
and she would have probably taken a bite
out of my ear or something.
What we had started out doing
was we actually started touching her with this.
So obviously, I would never go reaching in
and touching any Nile monitor at all,
so what I did was I would rub her
on the back with this, all the time,
and it got to a point where she actually started to learn
that meant "Get out of the water, he's gonna clean it up,
I'm gonna have clean water here in a few minutes."
So, once she started to realize that,
that trust really started to begin,
and we started actually forming our little friendship here,
and she started becoming a really great girl.
The combination of actually doing the target training,
doing that little trust movement with the hook,
I'm interacting with her,
touching her around the face
and doing all these sort of things
that just really wouldn't do with a Nile monitor at all.
Once she got to the point where it's just like,
touching her on the face doesn't mean anything,
it doesn't mean I'm gonna get food right now,
I know the blue ball means food,
and she's just like, oh my God, look at this thing,
she's so fricking cute.
- You guys remember yesterday, I was trying to feed Diddy,
and he was coming up and taking food,
but Bruce has really been working on his kind of habituation
to coming out and actually going
on his shoulder and stuff like that,
so let's go ahead and see what he's got going on.
- You wanna come down, bud?
You can see the food and come down, come on.
Eat up buddy, good job!
So what I've been trying to do
so he'd get used to our touch
is instead of reaching in there and touching him,
I get him to come out to me. Come on bud.
Come on, you know the drill.
Come on up.
There you go.
All right, bud.
As you guys can see, he's still sorta nervous,
like I'm getting up high, I mean,
thanks for that, right in the face, thanks bud.
He's very sweet, he's just like Bella,
right in my face, thanks buddy, appreciate it,
but he loves to go up high,
so getting up high is really where we want him to be,
and he'll be happier, and he'll eventually poop on me,
wherever he's planning on going.
So it's a work in progress,
this isn't going to just happen overnight,
it's the baby steps.
The fact that he isn't freaking out,
and he's actually eating off my arm like this,
this is a huge step, this is big.
It may not seem like a lot, but it really means a lot to me,
and like I tell everybody every day,
as long as I get a little bit, I'll take it.
- Yeah, and that's the thing,
it's just about being consistent,
and it's about just those slow baby steps,
and Diddy is doing amazing,
and you can see, even with Bruce,
how much better he did for Bruce than he did for me.
Eventually we're gonna get him to the point
where he'll do that to anyone,
and crawl right up on their arms,
and people that are coming to visit the Reptarium
can interact with Diddy just like they do with Bella.
With Diddy we hope that they'll actually
be able to hold it,
unlike Bella that you can only pet,
but he's doing amazing.
- Last but definitely not least, this is Chicken Strip,
my absolute favorite right here,
because I'm really trying to work on him really hard,
and obviously he's still a little baby,
and we all know all the stories about Chicken Strip,
we've all seen him, and honestly,
all the time when I pull him out,
I gotta tire him out like crazy,
cause you know how crazy he can be.
So I get him tired out,
and then I hold him like this forever,
and honestly he's a sweetheart, he really is,
he's not even really all that angry at me,
he's just scared, he's a little guy.
But I'm really excited about getting him tamed down
just like we do, it'll be so good.
- And again, these are a bunch of different options.
I think personally, and the way my life has went,
I think the educational side has so much opportunity,
because you don't need a lot of time,
you don't need a lot of investment, and quite frankly,
you don't even need a tremendous amount of experience.
All you need is enthusiasm,
knowledge that you can gain for sure,
and you can go out and you can do educational shows.
Schools are always looking
for people to do educational shows,
birthday parties, library events,
all kinds of different things.
There's a lot of opportunity there, and that's something
that I'm doing a tremendous amount of now,
and I love it.
It's one of the favorite things I've ever done
in my entire life,
is getting around kids in particular
and teaching them about reptiles,
so it's a great way to really work with animals quickly
without having to get a college degree
or having a ton of money,
or taking five, six, seven years to build your business.
So education not only is incredibly awesome, very-
(dog barks)
Edu- (dog barks)
Zoe! Education is not only incredi-
Education is not only super important,
it's also extre- (dog barks)
Oh my gosh. (laughs)
Education is not only so important,
it's also really a fun thing to do, and for me,
I've kind of evolved into a situation
where education is number one when it comes to my future.
So as you can see,
there's a lot of options
if you want to start working with animals,
but the biggest advices I could give you,
is just keep doing it, follow your dreams, don't stop,
and you'll eventually get there.
I hope that you enjoyed it,
let me know in the comments what you think.
If you enjoyed this video, here's another video,
here's an entire playlist I would love for you guys to see.
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Have a wonderful day, be kind to someone,
and I promise, I'll see you guys tomorrow.