Encyclopedia of animal rights and animal 529

486 | Reptiles The ability of reptiles to learn, suffer, communicate, play, and socialize is generally underestimated, even by many herpetologists Data are accumulating on many species which indicate that reptiles are not the robot-like, insensitive, simple, and stupid animals many think they are This mistake is fostered because while reptiles not have complex facial or vocal repertoires, tactile, chemical, and whole body visual displays are common and important in communication The metabolic rate of reptiles is about 10 percent that of mammals and birds, and thus their behavior is often slow, for example, in the movements of land turtles, or sporadic, although there are many exceptions Furthermore, reptiles are often ecologically specialized and critically dependent upon having proper temperature, humidity, diets, lighting, substrates, perches, retreats, and other captive arrangements to stimulate normal activity Knowing their natural behavior aids greatly in providing appropriate captive conditions for reptiles An indication of the bias against this constricted view of reptilian abilities is seen in the hot-blooded dinosaur controversy which elevates dinosaurs above mere reptiles by willful ignorance of the documented complexity of reptile behavior (Burghardt, 1977) Reptiles are fascinating both in how they look and in their behavior They are now highly popular as pets, especially rat snakes, leopard geckos, bearded dragons, and boas A major problem is that the behavioral, nutritional, environmental, medical, and psychological needs of reptiles are rather different, indeed alien to, ours and those of our common companion animals, namely dogs, cats, birds, and rodents However, many people keep reptiles because they seem to need less care than traditional mammalian and avian species This leads to many problems and the premature deaths of literally thousands of animals each year For example, reptiles can go much longer without food than other vertebrates, and many slowly starve to death or succumb to poor nutrition, insufficient temperatures for digesting food, or inadequate lighting with insufficient ultraviolet radiation Reptiles possess many traits that are useful for answering important questions about animal biology and behavior (Greenberg et al., 1989) Snakes possess chemosensory abilities more acute than most other terrestrial vertebrates Reptiles can be both short- and long-lived, have behavior patterns that can be measured and recorded easily, and are important ecological components of many habitats where they occur Many species are affected by habitat loss or changes due to human activity Many reptiles are also killed directly by ignorant, fearful people Others are exploited for food, skins, and the pet trade, in numbers that threaten the survival of many species, including once-common species of turtles in North America There are many sources of accurate information on reptiles Several organizations and publications in the United States and Europe are devoted to investigation and dissemination of accurate information on captive reptiles, including books and pamphlets on selected species or groups More scholarly sources are now also available The multivolume Biology of the Reptilia series founded and edited by Carl Gans and subsequent coeditors has been published since the 1960s and now contains over 20 volumes covering almost every aspect of anatomy, physiology, ecology, and behavior The Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles is the largest