Reptophilia.

Twenty years ago, I had a patient who kept a boa constrictor as a pet in his London apartment. My patient often went abroad, but as large snakes require feeding only once a month, his absence caused the snake no hardship. However, after the snake had grown to more than twenty feet, my patient became so ter- rified of it that he refused one day to return to his apartment.

"I suppose you've got what one might call a phoboa," I said, with the callow humor of youth.

Ever since then I have retained something of an interest in those who sell and keep snakes and other reptiles. About ten years ago, I came across a shop in the prosperous London suburb of Twickenham called Respectable Reptiles. It was run by two evangelical Christians who, dissatisfied with their lives, had prayed for guidance as to what they should do next. God told them to open a reptile shop in Twickenham.

I next visited the Serpentarium in the wretched industrial town of Wallsall. I could not but notice how many of the customers were of the tattooed and body-pierced fraternity; besides their snakes they kept, I learned, tarantulas and scorpions. Not long after my visit, the owner of the shop was found float- ing in a local canal; and while the official version is that he jumped, many surmise that he was pushed.

Pursuing my desultory sociological enquires further, I spoke recently to a psychiatrist friend who specializes in drug addiction. She told me that the snake-keepers among her patients were mostly psychopaths. They kept snakes as a symbol of their toughness and outlawry.

It is, in fact, principally among drug addicts and pushers that the illegal trade in venomous snakes is carried on. It is not actually illegal to keep such snakes in Britain, but a license costing $200 is required under the Dangerous and Wild Animals Act of 1976 (until the passage of which there was no restriction on keeping a lion in a suburban back garden, though dog-owners still needed an annual license). About a thousand applications for such licenses are received each year, though it is not certain how many of them are for spitting cobras, puff adders, and the like.

One reptile-shop owner to whom I spoke recently couldn't understand the inter- est in such dangerous snakes. "Who'd want a venomous," he said, shaking his head in bemusement, "when you could have a nice python?"

The final stage in my reptilian enquires entailed a visit to Proteus, a charitable organization in Birmingham devoted to the rescue of maltreated and unwanted reptiles. When I arrived there I found one of the trustees and a fel- low worker removing the sloughed skin of a 15-foot reticulated python with vitamin-C deficiency. Snakes over 8 feet long should never be handled by a single person, I was told; this python could kill a man with no difficulty.

The organization has two reptile ambulances, and receives an average of two calls per day from around the country. The work of the organization throws an oblique but lurid light upon the operations of human nature, at least in its British incarnation.

Four species dominate the rescue work of Proteus: bosk monitor lizards, green iguanas, red-eared terrapins, and reticulated pythons. Most people who buy pets do so on impulse, without realizing what is entailed in keeping them, such as expense and inconvenience.

Millions of red-eared terrapins were imported into Britain during the Ninja Mutant Turtle craze, selling for 80 cents each. Parents were reluctant to deny their children's whims; but when the wretched creatures grew, and quite literally bit the hand that fed them, or when articles in the newspapers and items on television publicized the fact that the terrapins harbored up to two hundred strains of salmonella, parents dumped them by the dozen into the nearest pond, canal, or stream, where they ate the local fish and died soon afterward.

As for boas and pythons, those who buy them as "adorable" little snakes are alarmed at their tendency to grow large, even on a diet of as little as three or four rats or rabbits a month. (No reptile shop is complete without its rec- tangular slabs of frozen rodents, though psychopaths, I am told, prefer live to frozen pet food.)

Iguanas, though vegetarian, grow large also, and males have the unpleasant habit of sexually attacking menstruating women (thus giving a new meaning to The Night of the Iguana). Their popularity as a species is growing rapidly nonetheless: eight years ago there were 1,000 iguanas in Scotland; now there are 25,000.

Many iguana owners feed their animals incorrectly. They reason as follows:

Cats are pets.

Cats eat tinned catfood.

Iguanas are pets.

Therefore iguanas eat tinned catfood.

This reasoning is a fine tribute to the effects of universal compulsory educa- tion. But the fact is, catfood kills iguanas. Even those iguana owners who appreciate that the lizards are vegetarian are inclined to feed them on let- tuce, tomato, and cucumber, and then are annoyed when they fail to thrive.

They are equally annoyed, however, when they do thrive, for then they grow quickly and require new cages, for which their owners, often precariously placed from the financial point of view, had not budgeted. Some dispense with cages altogether, and just put the lizards on top of their central heating system, causing burns. They are unwilling to pay the veterinary bills, and instead call on Proteus to remove and care for the offending animal. Proteus has a waiting list, never shorter than twenty, of iguanas which owners want to relinquish into its care. Sometimes owners impatient to be rid of the crea- tures threaten to kill them unless Proteus acts quickly: but it refuses to be blackmailed in this fashion.

I looked into a cage with a huge, fat lizard called a Nile monitor. It had belonged to a young woman who lived on her own in a single room. She wanted to exercise her monitor (which had grown larger and worse-tempered than she had expected), but found that once it was released, she couldn't get it back into the cage. Proteus came to her rescue.

No disillusioned reptile owner who calls upon Proteus ever blames himself for what has happened. He always blames someone else, usually the pet shop: he wasn't told that pythons grew so large, he wasn't told that reptiles needed a thermostatically controlled vivarium, he wasn't told that they harbored dis- eases or that they bit. One woman whose baby died after becoming infected with salmonella from the feces of the lizard she had let roam in the house blamed the lizard itself -- believing it to be not only physically causative of her baby's death, but morally culpable as well.

Proteus teaches us an important lesson. When Pope (who lived in Twickenham, erstwhile home of Respectable Reptiles) wrote that the proper study of Mankind is Man, he was wrong: the proper study of Mankind is Snake. I have long suspected it.