(upbeat rhythm)
- Hey, good morning everybody,
and welcome to the vlog!
My little girl Salt here
is such an amazing albino alligator,
and truth be told, I'm not gonna lie to you,
I've been spending so much time over here
working with Salt and all the animals here
that my pet alligator RJ
is getting a little bit cantankerous.
Yesterday we actually shot a video on Noah's channel,
I'll put a link in the description,
you can go check that out,
and I'll tell you what,
RJ was not happy.
And it really is my fault.
I just haven't spent the time with him
over the last few months,
so I need to get in his pond today
and see if I can't kind of rectify this thing.
Because I've been telling you guys
I want to do a swim-with,
I can't have a swim-with experience with RJ
if everyone's gonna get their hand chewed off!
You know what I mean?
So, what do you say, we put Salty back here,
go and spend time with my big alligator, RJ.
So I obviously have to spend some time with RJ,
there's no doubt about it, I know.
He's went through this before,
where he goes through a little period of time
where he becomes real territorial,
doesn't want to be out, all that stuff.
He is great, once you take him out he's a puppy dog.
But now, all of a sudden,
once I'm getting in the water with him,
he's wanting to attack.
So I have to get in there, try to break him of that,
'cause you guys know that I'm trying
to do the swimming-with thing,
and I can't have people get in if he's acting like this.
I was totally blown away that it happened.
I know it's shallow, so I'm gonna go in,
and wish me luck, guys.
I hope I can kind of get that relationship bonded back,
where he doesn't want to try to bite when I go in.
But I have a feeling this is gonna be a bad one.
So what I'm gonna do to protect myself
is I just have this snake hook, here,
but this is actually a carbon, here,
that isn't gonna hurt his teeth and stuff like that,
that's gonna protect me if he's kinda lunging
and stuff like that.
Everyone uses kind of an alligator pole,
sometimes it's a PVC pole, stuff like that.
But anyways, he's over here,
I'm not excited about the direction he's in right now,
to be totally honest with you.
So I'm gonna have no choice
but to kind of come over here,
and start-
Whoa, he is not happy.
Yeah, this is gonna be tough, guys,
I'm not gonna lie to you.
This is not gonna be the RJ I know.
(splashing)
Get down, get down, get down.
(hissing)
Get down, stop, RJ!
Wow, this crazy, guys.
(hissing)
Whoa!
Yeah, I've gotta get out for a second.
Just gonna keep working with him.
(hissing)
It's okay, we're gonna be all right.
- Ooh, come on, RJ.
(hissing)
RJ, stop.
Stop.
Come on big boy- (splashing)
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!
Ooh! (laughs)
RJ, whoa!
Okay, okay, RJ.
It's all right, buddy.
Come on.
And again, he's just asserting his dominance
on me right now.
Which is what happens when alligators
start to get bigger,
and I have to, somehow,
just keep working with him.
And make him understand that this isn't right.
That he's not gonna be able to do this.
And again, if this continues-
(splashing)
Whoa!
Okay, RJ, you're all right, buddy.
You're okay.
(hissing)
We're pals!
Come on, RJ.
All right, baby.
Again, he's at that size where,
I'm not gonna lie to you,
like if he got me, it would be pretty bad.
So I have to be-
Whoa, oh, I lost my pole.
He just grabbed my pole.
Whoa!
Okay.
Arj, get outta here.
(splashing)
RJ, come on.
Come on, stop it!
Knock it off!
We're done.
No more.
(mumbles)
Yeah, it's a slow process-
Whoa!
Come on, big boy.
This is so unlike RJ.
It's so unbelievable,
I've known this guy for nine years,
and only one other time
did he go through a short period of time
that was similar to this,
where he just really wanted to try
to break that bond that we have.
So now, I have no choice
but to just keep working with him.
You, know?
Just keep on working with him.
Get him in the-
It's okay, RJ, RJ.
It's okay.
It's all right, buddy.
Okay, we're back in here, real gentle.
RJ, stop it.
Arj, do you hear me?
We're good, we're friends, right?
Are we friends?
Again, we're not there yet- whoop.
It's gonna take some time.
It's okay, buddy, we're good. (splashing)
Whoa!
Okay, we're all right.
RJ, we're okay, we're friends.
(splashing) Whoa!
Woo! (Laughs)
All right, all right.
Gotta keep on working him,
keep working him.
It's okay, buddy.
Stop it.
(hissing)
RJ.
Yeah, he's jut like hyper as could be right now,
I mean, every movement I make,
he just tries to bite, bite, bite.
It's so bizarre.
And again, this goes back to really my fault,
because I used to work with him daily,
and since The Reptarium has been open,
you know, I don't spend as much time with him now,
because I'm always working with the animals over there,
Salt and Pepper and all those guys.
And RJ gets worked with maybe once in a while.
What happens is, now that he's - basically,
a lot of times that we're working with him,
he's just getting fed,
he's kinda putting that thing, like,
"I don't need to be that tame alligator
that I've been for so long."
And now I have to somehow break him of this.
It's gonna take some time,
I'm gonna do my best to try to get him today,
but if I can't get him today,
I'll get him tomorrow, you know?
I just gotta - baby steps,
I gotta continue to try to break this animal,
so that when we do swimming-with, it's gonna be okay.
Tell you what, guys, what I think I'm gonna do
is I'm gonna change my mentality just a little bit here,
and rather than getting in the water with him,
I'm gonna go ahead and see
if I can't pull him out of the water.
Because it seems like once I'm in the water,
he's super territorial.
So I'm gonna go ahead and just see
what I can do about getting him out
because again, I wanna keep on getting him out of the water.
(sighs) Okay, let's do this.
(hissing)
(splashing)
Come on, big boy.
(splashing)
(mumbles)
Slow process.
(splashing)
There he goes.
Okay, so here we go, we got him out,
he's all right, he's acting like his old self once he's out.
Again, it's a territorial thing,
that I have to break him of.
So we're gonna get him out, we're gonna play with him,
we're gonna habituate him, and then we'll keep on trying.
I might put him back in the water,
and then go in the water and see if he acts any different.
But it's important to make sure he understands
he can't try to bite people, he can't try to bite me.
But I understand.
This is an animal, it's a wild animal.
And the fact that I didn't work with him as much
over the last few months, this is what happens.
You gotta stay consistent with the training.
So, see, RJ?
It's okay, baby.
See, he's a beautiful animal,
but definitely a handful today.
So I'm gonna put him back in,
see if I can get in, and see what happens.
(splashing)
Hey.
(splashing)
There we go!
Got a little bit different animal, now, right?
And that's what it's about.
Just baby steps.
I'll continue to work with him like this,
and we'll get him good.
Good boy, RJ.
Good boy.
Good boy, RJ.
See?
That's how you gotta work with a big predator like this.
Just gotta gain their trust,
he understands I'm not trying to hurt him,
baby steps, we'll get him back,
we'll start doing this a lot more frequently,
so that we can get back to that relationship.
That way, when we do the swim-with experience,
he's back to the old RJ.
So, okay.
Didn't start out very well, but I think it ended well.
(swooping)
- (laughing)
Today, I'm gonna be spot-cleaning the baby skinks,
so when I'm done with that,
they get supplemented with super worms,
and I just find it really entertaining
when they go to eat their super worms,
they kinda like grab it, and thrash their heads around
like they're killing it, but it's really ineffectual,
but it's kinda cute, so let's get started on that.
(relaxed upbeat rhythm)
- I know a lot of people have been asking about
an update on Mario-Luigi, the two-headed snapping turtle.
I wanted to give you the quick update.
And some of you people may have actually seen,
this guy made world star!
That's right, Mario-Luigi are famous,
they're world-star famous!
That's right, it's so cute.
So they're doing really, really well,
both heads are eating, they're absolutely adorable.
The only thing that we've had to worry about,
and this has been a huge heart attack a few times,
is that they are notorious for flipping over, right.
So two-headed turtles oftentimes can flip over
and then they can't get up and they can die!
So like three times,
we actually seen this little monkey flip over.
So we don't have the water too deep,
because if it's too deep he seems to flip over,
so we took all the rocks out that we used to have in here,
'cause he was climbing up on the rocks and flipping over.
And then we even had a backdrop that was like
a cork-bark backdrop that he was clawing on
and then flipping over,
so now he doesn't have anything he can actually grab onto it
and flip over.
Now we keep the water shallow,
but they're doing really good,
definitely a stressful situation.
And it's pretty cool that they're now world-star famous.
But again, really cool animals, really awesome,
cannot wait 'til they get a little bigger
and my stress level can go down a little bit.
We just got one interesting clutch of ball pythons
that hatched out today.
This was actually just a normal ball python
bred to a desert woma.
The desert is actually a co-dominant, dominant type of gene,
the reason that we don't know if it's co-dominant
is because females can't produce,
so you can't produce a super,
so really when we produce a male you could breed it,
but we actually only sell the females as pets,
because we do not want anyone to breed deserts
because they can potentially die, egg-bound,
and stuff like that.
Regardless, don't wanna get too far into that,
the point is, really beautiful animals,
we just ended up producing this little normal ball python.
The thing that's interesting
is things look a little bit different in this clutch,
I'm not exactly sure what's going on.
And then these two here are woma-ball pythons.
Again, just slightly different
from a normal woma-ball python.
I can't really put my finger on it,
but this is when things get pretty crazy,
to be honest with you.
These are desert-womas.
Now, the dad was a desert woma,
and the mum was just a normal,
but this one doesn't look anything like the dad.
Really interesting pattern,
like this bizarre like, dorsal patterning.
The head pattern is really cool.
Now the desert-woma stuff is always really beautiful,
but these guys look crazy.
And then this one is even more insane,
to be honest with you.
Hoo, doggy!
I tell you what, that is a ripper right there!
I have never seen one like this before.
I don't know if something's going on with the normal animal,
because the father has fathered several clutches this year
and I've produced nothing like this.
So obviously, the female must have something going on.
And when that happens, what you do is
you basically tag that female
and you start to try to work out,
maybe she's got some kind of a lilac thing going on,
maybe she's got some kind of hidden gene going on.
So we're gonna try to work with that female
and see if we can't maybe reproduce something really crazy
from her in the coming years.
But just take a look at that thing's head right there.
Oh my gosh!
It is so crazy.
So, again, these are two desert-womas,
but they don't look anything like normal desert-womas,
for sure.
And I'm gonna, really quick, just for the heck of it,
sex these guys out.
So this one is a male, which is great.
So a male is great, you can breed it,
you can do whatever you want with it,
and that's really good.
If it's a female, we only sell them as pets.
Guess what, both these guys are males,
so that's awesome!
They're both males so we don't have to worry about it,
but wow!
I am so excited by the results of what seemed to be
a pretty simple clutch.
Well that was absolutely insane with RJ!
Thank God he eventually let me hold him,
but I definitely have to work with that guy.
If you enjoyed this video,
here's another video with alligators,
here's an entire playlist with
just just a bunch of really cool stuff.
If you want, you can go ahead,
hit that subscribe button over there.
While you're at it,
can you go ahead and turn those post notifications on?
Have a wonderful day, remember to be kind to someone,
and I promise I'll see you guys tomorrow.