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Episode 10 of the Cold-blooded Contributions Podcast with Dillon Perron from Animals at Home.


If you would prefer to listen to the podcast, here is the link for Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2wshva20wAr7sDq4X666GT?si=7b9b1e0dcc164de4



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Scott: G'day. Welcome to episode number 10 of the Cold-blooded Contributions podcast, we are your hosts the Eippers. I am Scott Eipper, with me is my wife, Tie Eipper. This podcast will bring to you people in the hobby who have made an impact on us creatively. Be it artistically, with data or improving her husbandry. Today, we are stoked to have Dillon Perron from the Animals at Home podcast. G'day Dillon, how you going?


Dillon: Hello. Thank you guys so much for having me. I'm very, very excited for A) to be here and also B) to see that you guys are launching and taking this endeavour into the podcast world. So, thank you so much for having me.


Tie: Thank you for coming on Dylan. It's, awesome. It's been a few years.


Dillon: It has, yeah. I think I want to say fall of '21 you guys were on my show, so it's been a while.


Tie: Yeah, it has, hey. Time flies.


Dillon: It's crazy.


Scott: I think we were in the prepping stages of the Australasian Elapids book when we spoke to you last time actually.


Dillon: Yeah, you were, yeah.


Scott: Yeah, that seems like many moons ago now, that's for sure. (Laughter)


Dillon: Oh yeah. 


Tie: Dylan, where did you grow up and how did that affect who you became?


Dillon: Well, I grew up, well I live in Manitoba, Canada, which for those who are listening is the centre province in the country.


Map of Manitoba, Canada

So, we're kind of like in the northern tip of the Great Plains in North America. And I grew up in a small rural town. A) I was a country kid. I lived in the country until I was 13 or 14 and ended up moving to the city to pursue sport. But during those first 12, 13 years, there's always the term, you have a country kid and a city kid. And I think that really established me as a country person. We've recently moved out of the city because I think my heart is in the country. I need to be away from noise and cars and things. So, it had a ton of influence on me. I spent a lot of time outside with my friends and my brother and just being an outdoor kid. But also animal wise, I lived on basically a farm and my dad had all sorts of strange animals, including an emu farm at one point. We had an in-ground pool, which meant I was constantly collecting frogs and mice and moles and things that would fall in, and I would save their lives in the morning. Every morning that was my routine in the summertime. So there is a lot of wildlife and a lot of just being outside. And I think that has really been a big part of my character as I've grown into an adult. I really crave being, not necessarily outside, but just away from too many people, if you know what I mean.


Tie: Yeah, I grew up in the bush too, and looking back now as an adult, my kids didn't have that. And I'd wander off in the bush for hours with my brother and I’d love that.


Dillon: Yeah. There's a certain amount of freedom that you have just being in the country. It's actually quite safe. You're not dealing with traffic or sketchy people and whatnot. And you really get to learn a lot about the natural world just by playing. And I think that's a really crucial part of growing up that is hard to replicate if you live in a city setting.


Tie: Yeah.


Scott: Out of curiosity, you said that you moved to the city for sport. What sport was that?


Dillon: I was a swimmer. I swam for 18 years at a fairly high level, especially the last 10 years, at a national level and now that's my job. I coach swimming at a university here, so I've never really left the pool. I would say it's the number one passion in my life. It's what I have always done since I was six and animals obviously are a close second. That's why I had to move just to get a little closer to a pool.


Tie: That's awesome that you've been able to do what you love as a job.


Dillon: Yeah, I always say I don't have a job because, I've been on a pool deck since I was six. I do the podcast as a big part of my job, but then also my full time job is coaching. So, it really does not feel like I work. I work a ton. I'm working constantly. I'll do 12 hour days all the time between the podcast and coaching, but it never feels like, “Oh, we got to punch the clock, go to work.” It's fantastic.


Scott: So is there early starts in the morning for coaching?


Dillon: Yeah, only a couple of days a week, but there's a couple of days a week where I'm on deck at 5:38. That's always my time. I don't know why I'm so precise with it, but, there's a few early mornings a week.


Scott: Fair enough.


Tie: How cold does it get at the coldest?


Dillon: How cold? Oh, it gets cold. (Laughter)


Tie: I'm just thinking 5:30 in the morning in the middle of winter. (Laughter)


Dillon: 5:30 in the morning in the middle of the winter is horrible. It's pitch black and it's going to be black for another three or four hours. And at its coldest it'll be minus 40.


Tie: Uuuuggggggg.


Dillon: Lots of wind and lots of snow. Yeah, it gets cold. Waking up and knowing you have to go outside to scrape your car and drive a frozen vehicle halfway, my drive is not that far. It's about 15 minutes, but yeah, it's cold.


Tie: That's long enough at that time of the morning with that temperature. (laughter)


Scott: When you are saying minus 40, that's in Celsius?


Dillon: Actually I always say minus 40 because minus 40 is that one intersection where minus 40 Fahrenheit and  minus 40 Celsius are the exact same.


Scott: Oh, really? Okay.                  


Dillon: So yeah, it's one of those weird, I don't know how Fahrenheit works, but that's why I always say it, because it rings true to the Americans as well. But yeah, we'll have lots of stretches where we're in the minus 30 Celsius and with the wind, we'll get into the minus 40’s. Now that's not like a consistent thing through the winter. The average temperature is going to be minus 15 to minus 30, but it's pretty long. Our winter goes from late November to March ish. We'll start getting snow melt.


Scott: Yeah. So we're in the middle of our winter here right now, and overnight lows are getting down to about 5 degrees Celsius. During the day it's about 20, 21 or 22 degrees Celsius. Our winters aren't the same sort of winters that you guys have, that's for sure.


Tie: And now that Dylan said that, next time you whinge when it's cold in the night-time, I'm going to say “Remember the chat we just had with Dylan?” (Laughter)


Dillon: Yeah. I always say people should feel minus 30 just to see what that sensation is like. It's very cold. I mean, you cannot expose your skin. It hurts to breathe, that sort of stuff. You don't want to be outside.


Tie: Ooooohhhhh. We're definitely visiting in the summer, babe. (Laughter)


Dillon: Yeah, The summer's hot. I mean, today was plus 30 all day.


Scott: Celsius.


Dillon: Yeah.


Scott: Yeah. Okay. Fair enough.


Dillon: Yeah. We're not getting into the forties like you guys might,  but 30, 30 is a hot day here. It'll be plus 25 to 30 throughout the summer.


Scott: Right. Okay. Would that enable herping for you guys up there? How did you get into reptiles? Was it finding animals on your property when you're a kid?

 

Dillon: Due to the winters, the species of herpetofauna is pretty low, but we have a huge population of red sided garter snakes. They are some of my earliest memories, catching those, which are kind of few and far between with the property that I lived on. There'd be tons of frogs, Gray tree frogs and Wood frogs and different species of toad. That was some of my first interactions with amphibians and reptiles. And then I got into keeping when I was about 15 years old. That is when I got my first Crested gecko and I still have him. He's just over my shoulder. He's 17, 18 years old.  I'd always been an animal person. I'd kept tons of things before that, fish, birds, various things, rats. I always was fascinated with reptiles. So it didn't take me long to jump over to keeping one. When I was 15 and got my first Crested Gecko then that's how I jumped into it. I didn't really start getting into the hobby as a keeper that's interacting with other keepers for probably another almost like eight years. I just had that Crested Gecko, but then I got into the hobby at a kind of a deeper level and started getting some more species.


A Crested Gecko in it's enclosure belonging to Dillon Perron
Jaxson, Dillon's Crested Gecko

Tie: Just for our Australian viewers that are interested, can you explain the rules and regulations over there into keeping. What you have to do to maintain animals?


Dillon: Sure, It really depends. Our provinces are split up into what's called municipalities, and each municipality has different rules. What's the American term they use? County, right? It's sort of like a county where you have a section  of the province, which might incorporate maybe five or six towns kind of geographically in a similar area. Each one of those has very different bylaws. The one that I live in has zero bylaws. You can read the bylaws and there's nothing. I think it says you can have a maximum of four dogs or something like that, or three dogs. But other than that, there's nothing. The capital city in the province that I live in, they have much stricter rules, especially with reptiles. There's like a six-foot limit on snakes, or a six foot limit on pythons and boas. No, I guess it's in meters. It's a two-meter limit on boas and pythons and then a three meter limit on colubrids. Very, very random. A couple different lizards. I think lizards can't be more than maybe a meter. I forget exactly what it is, but there's some kind of different rules there. There's one in our province where you can keep whatever you want, but you have to register it with the government and, everything in between.


Scott: I've always thought it was interesting when they talk about sizing in regards to regulations. Is it the snout vent length or is it the maximum length, or is it the maximum recorded length of the species, or is it the average length that they get? Because you can get as an example, a Carpet  python. Most carpet pythons aren't going to exceed 2.4 metres long, even as adults. But you get exceptional animals that can to get up to 3. 6 meters long.


Dillon: Exactly.


Scott: So Are you allowed to keep it until it gets to certain lengths or do they not really prescribe that in the regulations?


Dillon: It isn't prescribed within the regulations and it's very, very ambiguous and very gray. Which is why when those regulations originally came in, there was a lot of people fighting to say you can tell that the person who wrote these regulations actually doesn't understand the group of animals that they're trying to regulate. There's some good things in there, like you can't keep primates and different things like that, or venomous animals, which, depending on where you live, that might make sense. But, the size one is very confusing. Then there's different species that get branched off and broken off all the time as taxonomy evolves and suddenly the bylaws don't apply to the animals that they used to. It's a really messy way to regulate and it also has no bearing on anything. It's very strange.


Tie: Say your python grows bigger than expected, what are you supposed to do with it?


Dillon: Exactly. I think what it does is it creates a lot of people just keeping under the table type thing. You're not showing pictures or telling people where you live because you're afraid. Now, I don't know if it's ever happened where animal control has broken down someone's door to go take their snake, but it's in the law. So technically they could. And in a lot of these cases, there's really no place for that animal to go. If they take your animal from you, because you have it illegally, they'll most likely just euthanize it. It's a very strange place where you have people who don't understand the animals trying to regulate them. I can understand in some sense, I talk about this all the time - people keeping animals that are too big, and we were talking about this before we went live. Keeping animals that are too big for their capacity to keep, and having some rules that maybe keep people within a gutter. Like, putting the bumpers up in a bowling lane to keep them within species that are more reasonable. It's not the end of the world, but you want somebody that knows what they’re doing controlling that and reviewing it.


Tie: Yep. I remember several years ago, probably twenty now, we had to go to a meeting. The demonstrators had to go to a meeting and they were discussing new caging sizes. Apparently for travel back then we were supposed to have bigger cages to transport animals. The height was half the size of the animal and the length of the cage was two times the length of the animal. So imagine transporting a scrub python.


Dillon: Yeah, you need a semi.(Laughter)


Tie: Yeah. So in the same instance, when we asked where this came from and they told us, we were like, “They've got nothing to do with reptiles. How are they supposed to know?” And every demonstrator was sort of like “No, that's not happening.”


Scott: That was the point of that consultancy period. At least they did consult and they did actually amend that in the end and said that sizing for transportation enclosures was only designated for macropods and stuff like that. But, the problem is, when people don't understand the animals that they're talking about that they're  regulating for, language issues can cause some fairly significant issues in regards to how you maintain and transport these animals around.


Dillon: Yeah, exactly. It's almost more dangerous having that much space for a reptile if you're transporting it.


Tie: And I don't think I know any demonstrator in Australia that has a semi (Laughter)


Dillon: To haul one snake.


Scott: I think this talk about the regulations sort of walks into something else that we were talking about before the episode as well. On social media recently, there's been a fair bit to do with discussions in regards to energy saving light bulbs and requirements regarding halogens and stuff like that. How are you finding things over stateside and in Canada in regards to the removal of a lot of the light globes from your general hardware stores?


Dillon: I guess I'll answer it in two parts. The first is my experience in Canada is I noticed a decrease in incandescent bulbs within the hardware stores probably about 18 months ago. I forget which laws came in at what time, but we definitely have energy saving laws on the books that are making it so these hardware stores can't sell incandescent and halogen bulbs anymore. So they were just selling overstock, selling through them. Now if you walk into Home Depot you will not find any, but you can still go to any reptile store, pet store, or order online and get your reptile designated bulbs or go to a farm store and get bulbs for chicks, like brooding lamps and whatnot. So that hasn't changed at all. So if you're somebody that's buying a lot of light bulbs and used to go to the hardware store to save money because you want to just buy a regular flood lamp, you can't really do that anymore. You have to go buy the reptile branded bulb to satisfy your need. And then in the States. That's when we've kind of seen all this excitement about  their law from their department of energy, which had basically made a rule that  you can no longer sell incandescent bulbs. Reptile bulbs did not fall within the exemptions that they were giving other farming bulbs and whatnot. So as far as things are right now, you can still go to most reptile stores and buy reptile bulbs. I'm not sure about their hardware stores. I imagine their hardware stores are in a similar state to what Canada is. You're not going to find many, but if you go to a reptile store, you're going to still find all the heat bulbs that you need. But the big thing that happened in the last couple of weeks that people got very excited, in a negative way, is that Zoo Med got a letter from the government basically saying there's the list of bulbs that you cannot sell. So Zoo Med had to pull those so to speak off the shelf. I don't know if Zoo Med actually sells bulbs at their facility, but most of the bulbs that get sold are in independent pet stores or chains. The chains and the online retailers have not done anything to remove those bulbs off the shelves or their virtual shelves. So most people can still buy things. That's where people were thinking if they're banned, why can I still go on Amazon or why can I still go to PetSmart. com and buy them? It's because the retailers haven't budged on that. It's just Zoo Med that's basically been told you can't do this anymore. They haven't even contacted the other reptile brands. So it is a bit of a strange situation and I think Zoo Med is working with the government to make them understand that these bulbs are actually vital for health and we're not using them in our kitchens and whatnot. We'll see what happens over the next couple of weeks or months, I guess. I know lots of people have been writing to the Department of Energy and trying to get them to sway their decisions. So we'll see.


Scott: In Australia about 10 years ago, we had energy saving bulbs become a requirement outside of specialist use. Obviously, animals were classed as specialist use bulbs. So that wasn't an issue, but we did see all of the normal incandescent filament light globes and stuff like that all get removed. You still had some halogens available, but not all. And basically the transition across to either fluorescent or to LED technology. Now you would struggle to actually buy a filament lightbulb now outside of something that's used for animals these days in Australia..

 

Dillon: Yeah, so it just means you have to spend a little more money going to the reptile brand, which is okay, that's not the end of the world, it's also good to support these brands. But, if they actually remove them off the shelves as far as the specialty use for reptiles, then it becomes a problem. I imagine that this is not going to happen, I imagine that we'll come up with a solution and the government will realize that that doesn't make any sense, but, you never know.


Tie: Yeah, that's it. You never know. Did you ever expect yourself to be doing what you are now Dylan with the podcast and coaching?


Dillon: I'm not surprised by coaching, like I said, it's a deep passion of mine being involved in that sport. If you had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up when I was a kid, I would have said a scientist and I would have said a biologist. Someone that was researching and working with animals, I kind of started down that path, but swimming was more important to me at the time through my university years. So, I really focused on that and attempting to get a degree in biology was just not going to happen. I needed to take something a little bit lighter. So, my degree is in anthropology, which was easier for me because I had less labs. I wasn't spending hours and hours a week in a lab, which really simplified my ability to get a degree and also continue to compete at a relatively high level. That kind of took away the researcher biologist path which was okay because swimming became a career for me. But now that I'm doing the podcast, I find it very funny because I essentially am working with animals. I am every day. My life is involved with animals, whether it's the animals behind me that I'm working with in my private collection, but more so this podcast has become a job for me. It is a kind of a career for me as well. So I guess I'm not surprised because it is linked to what I would have thought I would have wanted to do as a kid, working with animals, but it's definitely not in the way or the capacity that I thought I would be. I mean, back then nobody knew what a podcast was anyway. In many ways it kind of worked out. I get to kind of combine both passions as a career.


Tie: We had said to the kids once that we were older than the internet and the look on the kids faces…. That just made me think of that when you said obviously no one knew what a podcast was back then.


Dillon: Yeah, they can't conceptualize that. They're like, that makes no sense. (Laughter)


Tie: Yeah, how old? 


Scott: You were saying that you've got a few species that you keep. What species of reptiles are you actually keeping?


Dillon: I have two boas. One is kind of like a hybrid boa. This is the very first boa I ever bought, so the bloodline's a little bit muddy. But as far as I can tell it's a hybrid between a Sonoran desert boa and a Columbia boa, just a Boa imperator. The Sonoran Boa now is a slightly different species. I think it's Boa sigma. So potentially it's some sort of hybrid. I don't think it's an F1. I think it's more like an F2 or F3. So, I have one of those. I have a regular Boa imperator, just a Columbian Boa, a Rainbow Boa, a Jungle Carpet Python, my Crested Gecko. And then, my most recent animal which is I've had for two years now is a Japanese Rat Snake. And that’s it. Nice and small.


Boa
One of Dillon's boas.

Tie: What animal is on your wish list?


Dillon: I've been recently obsessed with Grey banded kingsnakes, and to quench that thirst of wanting to just go out and buy a new animal, I just bought a book on them to look at pictures (laughter), which actually kind of helped.


Scott: Is that the publication from Eco, the A4 sized book on Kingsnakes? 


Dillon: Yeah.


Tie Eipper: That’s a nice book, that one.


Dillon: It's nice. It's got lots of pictures and that's all I needed. (laughter) It turns out I just wanted to look at pictures of them. There's so many. I would love to have Amazon tree boas one day. I mean, I think everybody is drawn to Green tree pythons as well. Recently, I was really attracted to the Grey banded kings. I was really obsessed with Milksnakes and North American colubrids as well, which in many ways, I almost wish I originally went down that path because I think it would be easier for me to keep based off the climate that I live in. I wouldn't have to work as hard to maintain humidity and heat in the winter. One of the things when you are blasting heat as much as we have to in the winter, it just dries the air out inside. So I have to really work at keeping humidity up in my room for these tropical species. So yeah, I think North American colubrids would be amazing as well. So yeah, there's lots. As always, as every reptile person.


Scott: What you're touching on there is quite interesting in that it's something that for people to consider. When they're reading care sheets or information about keeping animals is that they do vary depending on where you're keeping them. So keeping an animal in subtropical Australia is very different to keeping an animal in cool temperate Australia. I imagine it's very much the same over in the U. S. and in Canada as well, and even in different areas that have got a higher relative humidity across the board, to other areas that are dry, I suppose.


Reptile enclosures that are the background for Dillon when he records the Animals At Home podcast
Some of the enclosures in Dillon's herp room, a lovely backdrop for the Animals at Home Podcast!

Dillon: Oh, totally. Where I live it gets very humid in the summer. Right now, I'm sitting in my basement and its about 50 percent humidity, which is fine. And outside it's probably a little bit more humid. We have these large lakes in the province. So, with the heat of the summer it gets very humid. And I always thought this is a quite a humid place in the summer. And then in the fall last year, I went to Florida and then I actually felt real humidity. (laughter) I was like “Oh my God, this is so insanely humid. I can't even believe it. Like the walls are weeping and it's wet in the air” That sort of humidity, you can't really replicate. You can replicate it within an enclosure, but it's in some ways dangerous and you're creating lots of stagnant air, wet, dank air almost. And when you are keeping animals in a place where there is just that much moisture in the air, you don't have to do anything to keep the humidity up because it's just part of the package of living where you live. But when you're trying to force climate parameters into a place and almost like just vice grip them there it can be a challenge. I think, like you said, Scott, it's a great thing for people to think when they're getting into animals “What Animals would work well in the climate that I have?” Obviously you're inside, so you have a lot of ability to manipulate climate indoors, but you still have to work with what you have. And even the day/night cycle. We get really short days in the winter. My animals that I keep, they're pretty much on the equator. Their day from the winter to the summer is not that different. So, that's a challenge as well. There's a lot of things to think about when it comes to trying to match up your own climate with what you keep.


Scott: In the roof of our herp building we put windows. Double glazed windows in the roof and we see changes in the moon phases between the activity levels and the animals at night. There's so much out there, if you set your building up or your room up correctly, that even outside influences can have a significant change. Where we are in Southeast Queensland and only keeping Australian species, the light cycle, doesn't vary that significantly in Australia. The most southern parts of Tasmania, you've got up to 18 hour days in the summer, and then seven and a half hours of really good light in the winter. Compared to almost 12/12 on the tip of Cape York. So you've got a little bit of variance here, but nowhere near as much as what you see in North America. And certainly you were saying before about having a few hours daylight during the middle of your winter, that's a very different state of things to what we're used to dealing with over here, that's for sure.


Dillon: Yeah, exactly, that adds challenges. When I grew up, my first two years of my life were very far north. My dad worked for the hydro company, the electrical company here, working on hydro dams, and they have lots of dams up north. So, in that area in the summer, the sun would just hit the horizon at night and then come back up. You wouldn't even get dark. Like you said, it really depends on where you live. You're going to be dealing with different conditions.


Tie: I think that's something that's really awesome to be verbalized as well, because new keepers, are excited, and they're caught up with Oh, I can get my hands on this, this and this. Not so much in Australia obviously because of the laws, but overseas. And they think “Yeah, it’s in a tank, it's in an enclosure or whatever. I can give it what it needs.” But they don't take into account the room.


Dillon: Yes. And another thing that's almost more interesting to the beginner to look at as far as keeping animals that are native to you, and I say this all the time on the podcast, is you can immediately go outside and grab things that look exactly like the habitat of the animal you keep. There's something to that and I'm always jealous of Australian keepers because you guys are forced to do that. You can go outside, go to the bush. I was just talking to Luke from Beaches Scaly Reptiles is that right? I hope I'm not saying the name of the channel wrong, but anyway, I praise the way his enclosures look because he just goes out and he grabs these really cool branches and whatnot, and it just fits the animal perfectly because that's what they have in the wild. I always get sad when I'm sprinkling deciduous oak leaves into my boa enclosure, like this just doesn't look right. (laughter) I like the leaf litter, but I know it's just wrong.


Japanese rat snake
Japanese rat snake


Scott: We caught up with a person in Germany and they had some pretty incredible venomous species that they were keeping. He had a deal where he was catching up with the person who looked after the local botanical gardens and was going into the tropical house there to get his leaf litter for his enclosures. That was a pretty cool idea. But he was also telling us that he keeps some pretty incredible vipers. He's got rocks from those countries where those vipers are from to make sure that they've got the right look in those enclosures for those animals which is pretty insane.

 

Tie: His herp room - I haven't been to a zoo that touched on his herp room. His private collection was insane.


Dillon: It is crazy how intense herp people can get with that sort of thing where their like, I can't just go outside and grab a rock that looks similar to what I see on iNaturalist. I'm just going to go to the place and get the rocks, that's a special type of person.


Tie: He built everything himself as well. Oh, it was, it was next level.


Dillon: That's amazing.


Scott: For sure, and no social media presence, which is interesting as well. It's one of those interesting people that just has this incredible collection that you've never heard about until you see it, and it drops your jaw.


Dillon: That's cool.


Tie: And he was well known in Germany because quite a few people said to us “Have you been to so and so's place?” And we were like, “Yeah, we have.” So I guess you don't need social media in that instance.


Dillon: No!


Scott: How long did it take you to build the podcast from where you started to where you're at now, and how many listeners and viewers, have you got on your podcast/YouTube channel these days?


Dillon: I started my YouTube channel in the fall of 2017. Within a year, I started the podcast. So, the podcast started fall of 2018. So this will be coming up on six years somehow. So, it's been a while. We've recorded about 220 episodes. I think the last episode I put out was 206.  I also have a bunch of other ones, round tables and things that are not part of the episode catalogue, but are still episodes that I put out. So, I've been doing it for a long time. As far as listeners go, every episode it depends. The episodes will get somewhere between two and a hundred thousand people listening to it. It really depends on the episode. Typically between 2000 and 8000, 2000 and 10000 within the two months of it coming out. The show itself has been listened to over 3 million times, which makes no sense to my mind. It's crazy. 


Tie: Well done!


Dillon: It's a strange thing. And you guys will experience this as well. As a person who creates the podcast, you have no real sense of it in a weird way because you make it. You can't listen to the podcast as an external person because you're involved in the conversation. I'm the only person in the world that can't experience the Animals at Home podcast. I can't conceptualize it. I just make it and then it gets out there and people listen to it. So, yeah, it's grown. It took a long time, though. There were several years where it was a couple hundred people listening to it. And then it slowly grew over time, and of course YouTube does help because YouTube will promote episodes that people like. So it's coming up on six years and a lot of hours of work, that's for sure.


Tie: Did you do what we did? "Oh fuck, is that how we sound? Oh my god, do I really sound like that?" (Laughter)


Dillon: Oh yeah, I don't listen to my episodes after, I can't.


Tie: Yeah, I don't like the sound of mine either.


Dillon: Yeah,  I cannot listen to old episodes. To me, that's painful. An old episode for me is probably like three or four months back. As soon as I get that far back, I'm like, “Why did I say that?” You have all these conversations contemporaneously. You're not really scripting like we are now. It's just a conversation. So you go back and you go, “Ah, I wouldn't say that now”, that sort of thing. Then you get better, like your audio quality improves, you learn how to have a conversation and conduct an interview type thing as it goes through. But yeah, you definitely can't go back to episode one. It just hurts too much.


Tie: Also, too, on a podcast, I find, I'll go off on a tangent. So I didn't actually get to say all of what I wanted to say in answer to a specific question. Then I'm like, Oh God, that's come out a different way to how I think or feel because I didn't finish it.


Dillon: Yes, and it's too late. It's already out there.


Tie: Yeah. What's your favourite thing about podcasting?


Jungle carpet python in ambush in branch owned by Dillon Peron
Jungle race Carpet python


Dillon: I think the people that you meet. You end up meeting so many people and having these really interesting connections, it's not like you have a five minute conversation with somebody, you actually sit down with them and you'll talk to them for an hour or two and you get to know them in an interesting way. For sure the connections, I've learned so much from the podcast. That was really the reason why I started it. I wanted to know more about reptile keeping and especially dig into the ethical side to it, and it has taught me so much. And now I have friends all over the world.

I mean, everybody that I have a conversation with, they're like “Hey, if you're ever in this area, make sure you come drop by”. Which is kind of a weird thing too. So eventually I'm going to have to take everybody up on that. (laughter) When I travel the world, I'm going to be showing up at all your houses. But yeah, it's very cool.


Tie Eipper: Oh, we only said that cause we thought you wouldn't turn up. (Laughter)


Dillon: We heard you didn't have a passport and you couldn't get out of the country. (Laughter)


Tie: What's the most difficult part, do you think?


Dillon: As we were talking about before we went live, the postproduction is intense, and the amount of work that goes into the podcast….. I think a lot of people don't realize. You said before Tie, it's relatively simple… It's a conversation. It's just kind of a straight through thing, but there's so much behind the scenes stuff that's just not exciting and not fun to do. Whether it's creating show notes or editing and all these different things. I think that's the most difficult piece and that links to the longevity of it. I think the most difficult piece for me has just been continuing with it.  At this point now, it's kind of an ingrained habit and I don't know how I could stop the podcast. It feels like it's a train kind of going off on its own, but there was definitely a time, year two, year three, where you're like “Man, this is a lot of work” and you're not really sure how worth it it is, because even though you might have hundreds of listeners who are showing up every week to listen to it,  it's hard to gauge how much the interest is. So, one of the best things that you guys will be able to experience is you go to an expo or something and people will come up to you and say “Hey, I listened to the show. I love the show.” Those are the moments that will refuel you. To get you out of those “wow why am I doing this? I'm basically talking to myself half the time.” You need to have those connections with people that listen to the show and appreciate it. That gives you the energy to keep it going.


Tie: What you said there, a hundred percent. I think we'd done one or two episodes and we were down in Victoria for the VHS expo and I was wandering around and this couple come up to me and said “You're Tie aren't you?” And I'm like, “If it's good, yes. If it's bad, no.” And they're like, “No, we listened to your podcast and you mentioned that you have Sjogren's. We have a friend with Sjogren's and we don't know anyone else with it.” And out of an autoimmune disease, somebody connected with me. It was insane.


Dillon: Yeah, and that'll happen all the time. You'll meet people that listen to the show and as a listener, and I think this is well, maybe this is not going to be for generation Z, but, the millennials and up, most of our interactions with media as you grew up is on TV. It's professional. People who are on TV are famous. I think it's hard to actually disconnect yourself from that. It's like you see somebody on YouTube having a podcast. As a viewer, that's a really cool thing. And if they see you in person, it's even cooler, even though, you're like, “It's just me.”


Tie: Yeah, I bleed like you do. Yeah.


Dillon: Yeah. It's a lot less polished and a lot less professional than people think because they want to consume it. They listen to it. It's a really cool experience to know that you're actually making an impact and people are listening to it and taking the information that they learned from the show and actually helping the animals as well. It's cool to think the podcast has most likely, or I should say most definitely improved the welfare for many, many animals. That's probably one of the best parts.


Tie: Definitely.


Scott: Would you say that's probably what you're most proud of in regards to the impact that the Animals at Home podcast does provide? It gives that improvement of husbandry


Dillon: I think so. I listened to Reptile Podcast back in the mid teens, the 2000s, like 2015, 2016 type thing. I loved listening to the Reptile Podcasts and the fact that I have one now is very bizarre, but at that time I was also questioning if we should be keeping reptiles in captivity. I was kind of struggling with that and as most people do, you look at the animal, it's a beautiful animal and you see the box that it's in. Even if it's a beautiful box, it's still a box. Especially if you have an animal that starts to pace or something, then you really kind of get this sense of it. I wasn't really sure if it's something that we should be doing and  now, I can be very proud to say that Animals at Home really is one of the main sources for people who have that question as well. They can go to it and they might come away with the answer that we shouldn't be keeping reptiles, who knows, but they at least have a source to go to, It's very strange to think back on that time when I was kind of contemplating this myself, in my own room essentially, and now I've created this platform where that question is being asked and answered all the time.


Dillon's enclosures from the Animals At Home Podcast

Tie: And you have such a wide diversity of guests too. There's so many questions that people might not feel comfortable asking on Facebook, fear they're going to get laughed at or something like that. And you provide those answers.


Dillon: Yeah, I've had so many different guests and that's why I love listening to other reptile podcasts as well. My show - you're not digging into a species and you're not going to spend two hours learning everything there is to know about a certain genus. It really is keeper centric. Typically you're going to learn things about how you can become a better keeper. Now we'll of course talk about animals and different species and kind of dig into the weeds a little bit, but we don't go into something like Phil and Roy do on Project Herpetoculture where they'll spend like an hour and a half on a on a certain thing or two hours, or with you guys four hours (laughter) or whatever it was, on a specific group of animals. Instead, you're understanding how lighting works and the type of lighting that each animal needs, or how to replicate humidity cycles and build enclosures and do enclosure design and all those things that you actually do as a keeper, giving them the tools to be better at that. And I think, trying to do it in a way that doesn't make people feel like bad people. If they come at it from a place that's like I have 30 animals and now that I'm listening to the show, I can see that none of them have lighting, they have too small enclosures, I'm using newspapers as a substrate, yada, yada, yada. You don't want them to feel attacked. You want them to go “Okay. What's one thing I can do better now for these animals and, and grow from there?”


Tie: Definitely.


Scott: I think that's what you see with regards to the evolution of the keeper. You're hoping that the keepers can look at what they're doing and look at what they can improve on. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're keeping poorly to begin with. There's always something that generally can be improved upon whether it be incorporating enrichment or a different lighting system or looking at a new lighting system. That doesn't mean too that the brand new thing that just comes out is necessarily the best thing to use either.


Dillon: Exactly.


Tie: Or the most expensive thing.


Scott: Yeah, exactly. It's all about making educated decisions based on experience as well as the science that sits behind it. The one thing to remember is that science is always changing. Equipment is always changing and things are always you would hope, be on a continual improvement. Something that might be sort of touted as being fact five years ago may not necessarily be touted as fact today.


Dillon: Exactly. Yeah. And that's one thing that I really try to help reptile keepers with is that we become very obsessive with the animals we keep. And I think the most fun you have and the most enjoyment you have in the hobby is when you're sort of pushing your skill set to the limit. You're learning how to do something, whether it's learning about lighting or learning how to build an enclosure or set up an enclosure, or maybe you're just learning about how to research an animal. Those are the things where you just end up. The way I always describe it is it's those moments where you forget to eat. You haven't looked at Instagram in an hour, which for many people that's insane because you're so engrossed in this project that you're doing with your hands. But as a reptile keeper, sometimes instead of doing those activities, you end up just going to buy animals, because that's exciting too and that's fun, and it also does push your skill set because you're working with new species. We don't need to go into the examples of how that can go wrong because you end up with too many animals. But you can shift it back to that project mindset of doing research, or finding new information, or building a new enclosure. I'm doing a Japanese rat snake enclosure right now. He's been in a quarantine set up for like a year and a half now. It's not a quarantine, but it's a temporary habitat, we'll call it. I've been setting up his proper habitat and it's just been so fun. It's actually hard to turn that part of your brain off. I go to the pool and I'm thinking about like Kunashir Island rocks. I'm like “Okay, I got to turn off. I got to focus on what I'm doing here.” It's been so fun because I'm just engrossed in that project, I'm waking up early and thinking about things. Thinking in my head how I'm going to have the soil and the grass that I want to grow there and that's the hobby. Now that is reptile keeping, that's what makes it amazing. The more you can help people realize that you can actually get a lot out of the animals that you currently have, I think the better.


Tie: And I think too, the more research you find, you're then like, “Oh, I didn't know that was there, I didn't know that existed. I could do that” or whatever. Which leads you onto further and further research because you're finding cool stuff.


Dillon: Exactly. Yeah. It's bottomless really.


Tie: Yeah.


Scott: So who do you admire most in your professional circle? Who was your mentor?


Dillon: I honestly don't know the answer to this question. I'll watch content. This was not a mentor of mine, more of an inspiration for the podcast - the Herp Nation show. They were like a network, a podcast network back in the 2015, 2016. So those are the episodes of the podcast that I listened to.


Herp Nation Radio Podcast logo - the inspiration for the Podcast Dillon Perron started - Animals At Home

Nick Mutton hosted a show. Vince Russo hosted a show. That really like opened my eyes to these conversations are fascinating and I enjoy listening to them. That is probably the template of, I wouldn't call it a mentorship, but I would say that gave me the idea. But I think I, at a fault, tend to stay in my own lane and do my own thing. It drives my wife crazy. She's like, “Just ask the guy where the thing is that you're looking for” in the store. (laughter) So I'm really bad for just doing my own thing. I should probably actually start really branching out. I'm kind of bad for just trying to figure it out on my own.


Tie: In your opinion, what's the most crucial personality trait someone would need to do what you do and thrive?


Dillon: I think being curious is really the key to being able to have a good conversation with somebody. And it's hard when you first start, I was terrified for, I don't know how many episodes I was terrified to record for, but a long time. (laughter) Especially the first few, when you are new to it. It's actually very difficult to be curious because you're so scared that you're not going to know what to say next that you're barely listening to your guest speak. You're just trying to think of what the next thing to say is to keep the conversation rolling and you have to get through that. You have to at least record a few episodes like that in order to eventually get comfortable. But after that, once you kind of get through that, being curious is so key because everybody listening to the show is curious. That's why they're listening to it. And if you can remain open minded and curious and follow different threads that the guest is giving you, most likely they're threads that the listeners are already thinking about. That's what makes for a really good episode. One of the things that I always say makes for a great episode is when the host asks a question that the listener is thinking because you're in the same kind of mindset, you're thinking about it in the same way. The way to do that is just by remaining as open and curious as possible and not trying to come in with preconceived notions or even try to force the conversation into different ways. I remember early on when I started, I would try to almost force conversations down different paths because you're trying to hold control and it's not the way people have conversation. Conversation is flowing and both parties are participating in it. So yeah, I would say curious being curious is key


Tie: I'm the one that does the editing. I remove the filler words before it goes to air. So every time I speak I'm so conscious of “Don't say um, don't say or like. Scott repeats himself a lot. A lot of our guests say so, or you know, or and whatnot, and every time I open my mouth, I try so hard to just say the sentence I  fumble.


Dillon: Yes, that is remarkably difficult. You'll probably have to remove a thousand “You knows” from me. I try to do that as well, but it is hard. Then you're just thinking about the words coming out your mouth and suddenly you're having this out of body experience that's not helping you. (Laughter)


Tie: My god, what was I supposed to say? What was I supposed to ask?


Dillon: Exactly.


Scott: I think the human brain though is smart enough do to skip over those words, those filler words, because you use those filler words in conversation anyway.


Tie: You do, but I think it sounds a bit more polished, especially when there's a big long pause or whatnot. And there I go again. (laughter) I think it sounds more professional and whoever we're interviewing, especially if they have their own business, I try and remove them all, so it does sound more polished.


Dillon: Yeah. You're right, Scott. It does. It's amazing how your brain deletes them. One thing that I'll do is I'll create these little shorts or reels for Instagram or YouTube as a promo for each episode and you have the 60 second timeframe to work with. You're trying to jam all this information into 60 seconds. You're really going in with a scalpel and removing out all these spaces and words, just to make sure you can get a complete sentence out before the time ends. And I'm amazed at how many times I go through those where I'll listen to it a tenth time and then I'll be like “Oh, there's a bunch of filler words that I've totally missed that is going to save me like eight seconds in this reel”. But your brain just totally deletes them.


Scott: It's similar to what you see when you're writing as well. You go through and when trying to review your own manuscript before you send it over to peer review is an absolute nightmare, because you will read what you intended to write as opposed to what you've actually written.


Dillon: Totally, yeah.


Tie: I find if I don't look at it for two weeks, then I've got a way better chance of reading it. If it's pretty much a rush job last minute, we try and give everyone a month. If we haven't got it finished a month before we hand it over, we're both reading what we intended to write, not what we've actually written at some point.


Dillon: Yeah, it's amazing. You'll read over the same word that's totally wrong and not see it.


Tie: Yeah. Also too, doing the podcast, I'm sure you'll testify to, to get the maximum amount of listeners there's every faucet of social media that you need to advertise on. The time it takes……..


Dillon: Totally. That can be exhausting.


Scott: Speaking of reptile podcasts, other than of course the Animals at Home Network and the podcast that you guys have on your network there, what would be the top three reptile podcasts that you think our listeners should be chasing down if they're not already listening to it?


Dillon: I have to mention the network because The Project Herpetoculture podcast is fantastic. Reptiles and Research is great as well. They haven't put on an episode in a while, but they will be in the next coming months. They're just  moving. Snake Talk, I really like. If anyone listens, it's more kind of conservation based. It's by Chris Jenkins.  I like Snake Talk.  Well, MPR, obviously, you have to say MPR. I mean, there's how many different podcasts on there? You pretty much have everything in that group. So, there's those. Trying to think of what other ones I listen to that don't fall under that umbrella, I'm probably forgetting some good ones, but I think that really does cover a lot of them. Yeah. Am I forgetting any?



Scott: I think that if they're liking the field herping ones, the So Much Pingle podcast is a pretty good one.


Dillon: I've not heard that one. What's that one?


Scott: So Much Pingle by Mike Pingleton. He's done a heap of different herping ones, I suppose, and biologist type ones, that's quite good. And then the guys down south, Justin Smith and Phil Wolf and those guys from those podcasts down there are pretty good as well.


Dillon: Yeah. The Herpetoculture Network. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. They're great too.


Tie: You've interviewed a lot of people over the years, Dylan. What's the weirdest fact, you know, from doing the podcast for so long?


Dillon: Oh there's so many different weird things that you learn. I don't even know if this is weird, but I think everything I've learned about lighting has been fascinating. When you start digging into lighting, you realize that we just don't know anything. We especially don't know how light interacts with the body as such. Obviously, there are certain things that we know. We understand vitamin D synthesis. We understand heat absorption and things like that. But there's so many bizarre things with how the sunlight drives biology, that I think that's been one of the most exciting areas, and, one of the most expensive areas too. The more you learn about it, you're like, oh, here comes another lamp I gotta go buy. (laughter) I love learning about light, and I would say that's probably one of the most interesting things we've done. I shouldn't say the most interesting thing, but the physics of light and learning.


Tie: For you.


Dillon: Yeah. For, for me. Even the listeners, there's a lot of enjoyment that comes out of that and you wouldn't think so because it can be complex, it can be dry in some sense because you're going through graphs and things like that, but people really do actually enjoy that and they find it weird and interesting and it's good stuff.


Scott: I think especially when you're talking about the lighting, I tend to listen to podcasts. It's easier for me to listen to something rather than watch it on YouTube. But certainly, the lighting ones that you guys have done in the  past, I've had to go back and make sure I watch them on YouTube because you actually need to see some of those graphics that go along with it to really understand what's going on.


Dillon: Yeah it's so complex and you need the visual to at least aid a little bit, and even by the end of it you're like “I'm gonna have to listen to that one more time.” Even me as a person having the conversation, those are episodes that I've gone back to and listened to just because by the end of it you're tired of having the conversation, Not tired of having the conversation, exhausted from having that conversation because it's so in depth that you need to go back to reabsorb some of that.


Tie: Make sure you get it all. Yeah,


Dillon: Exactly.


Tie: Do you have any hobbies?


Dillon: Well, I would say no. (laughter) Between a two-year-old and swimming and the podcast and just the reptile world in general, those I would say those are my hobbies. I watch Formula one. That's the one thing I watch on TV. Other than that, I really don't watch TV at all cause I just fall asleep. I'm really bad with that. That would maybe be a hobby, watching some car racing a couple times a year. The tinkering, the building, that's a hobby for me and I don't share a ton of that with the YouTube channel because to me, I still like to keep that myself. Now this Japanese rat snake enclosure that I’m working on I’m filming that. I’m gonna put a video out about that, but a lot of times I don't put a ton of time into making videos like that because like I said, I don't like moving a tripod around and doing things. I like to be engrossed in that work. And to me, that's my hobby. I love that. That will always transcend into reptiles as well. Whether it's building a deck, or doing anything like that, that to me is the most fun I can have. Working with my hands and making something.


Dillon Perron's enclosure for his rat snake
Rat snake enclosure build


Scott: Is there someone that you've always wanted to interview on your podcast that you haven't been able to line up as yet?


Dillon: Sean Doody is someone who I'd love to have on the podcast. I just haven't because I want to be able to get through the book and I've just been so busy that I've not been able to. I've read some of it, but not all of it. I would love to have him on the podcast because I think that would be a fascinating conversation. Learning about the abilities for these animals to live a social life, which quite often they're touted not to be. I think that would be great. 


Scott: Sean’s got a lot of stuff in Australia here.


Dillon: Oh, have you guys worked with him at all? Or you just met him?


Scott: I've been at the Australian Society of Herpetologists meeting a couple of times with Sean as I recall. He's certainly written some pretty interesting papers on varanids in the Kimberley. He's done a fair bit of stuff in Australia.


Dillon: Yeah. I would love to have that conversation and a lot of times the podcast is flowing so quickly that the guests come to me. I end up having these amazing conversations with people that maybe I hadn't heard of, or only kind of knew on a sort of a minimal level. Then when you have the conversation, you get to learn so much more about them. There's probably a giant list of people that I wish to have on the podcast that I don't even know about yet. When I do have that conversation, it's one of those things where you go wow, I'm so glad you came on the show, or somebody pointed you out to me. Sometimes they reach out to me.


Tie: I think too, there's so many people out there and so little time to do the podcast that you don't really have that time to reach out that you'd like to.

 

Dillon: Yeah, and, I've told this story before. The reason I called it Animals at Home was because I was sure that reptiles was too small and I could never build a channel around just reptiles. I thought I would run out of ideas, but the list just doesn't stop growing. It just expands infinitely because there's so many amazing people that work with these animals that you could literally record a thousand episodes about reptiles and still have people to talk to.


Tie: Definitely. And there's so many new people coming up with brilliant ideas.


Dillon: Exactly. Yeah. You don't have to be talking to people that have been doing it for 30 years. You can talk to somebody who's only been doing it for five years, but is doing something so specific or different that they're worth sharing that information.


Tie: Definitely. Does work ever overwhelm you?


Dillon: Um, I would say yes. Swimming, coaching doesn't necessarily overwhelm me. It just takes a lot of time and I'll be on pool deck for long hours or at a meet and eat up an entire weekend or lots of my evenings. But I would say the podcast can overwhelm me. Now, fortunately, I have some amazing people that help me do it because once we had our son, I realized if I'm gonna continue producing a show, I need someone to edit, so I pay someone to edit now. I also have somebody that's helping me do show notes. Both of those things are just a huge weight off my shoulders, because it's the small things that take a lot of time. It can still get overwhelming because there's still so many different things to do and I'm very list oriented. I have a specific list of things that has to happen with each episode, whether that's getting the show notes out, doing the timestamps, making a thumbnail, etc, etc. I remember a few years ago I was consistently putting on an episode every Sunday. I was so scared about missing a Sunday or accidentally having it go out on Monday. I put a poll on YouTube to ask what day is it? Do you prefer the, I forget how I worded it, but basically what I realized after looking at the poll is that the listeners have no clue when the show comes out, they just listen to it when they see it. And I realized I was just doing that sort of stuff for myself because I tend to be very routined and do things like that. Over the last year or so, I've become more lax and said I'll get the episodes out when they're out. They're going to be out every seven to ten days, something like that. Doesn't have to be exact every time. And that's allowed me to be a little bit less overwhelmed than creating these strict rules for myself that no one cared about.


Tie: When I was researching on how to do the podcast, everything was saying be precise. You say you're going to do it on a certain day, do it on a certain day, because people get the shits with it basically.


Dillon: Yeah.


Tie: You have all that under your belt, and I think that adds to the pressure. All the polls that they've done apparently says this. So I've got to do this.


Dillon: Totally. Yeah. I believed that for a long time. I would tell people “You have to be consistent. You have to be consistent.” And now I actually don't believe that's true. I think people will listen to the show. They're not going to forget about the show. The listeners will show up. You don't need to be a slave to that and I think that's what I would get stuck in. I'm like, I have to do this. I'm staying up late to make sure it comes out on Sunday at 9 am. And actually, most people don't give a shit. (laughter) They'll just listen to it when it comes out. So, I don't think it needs to be as strict as many of those how to podcast blogs say they need to be.


Tie: Yeah. What do you do to de stress then?


Dillon: Working out helps. Although I'll go through phases where I don't work out for like eight weeks and then I find my anxiety goes up. I have a little workout space that's on the other side of my reptile room. I do that. Being with my son helps a lot. As stressful as being around a two year old can be, he also forces you to get out of your head because you can't constantly dwell and think when somebody's there, when you're trying to be with him and be in the moment with him. And then also like I said, going back to that building piece, if you can do some creating, whether it's doing some writing, or for me, mostly building with my hands. Sometimes we'll do a little bit of painting. My wife's a big painter. I'm not a painter, but I'll just create things on the page that sort of look like painting. That sort of stuff really does help. It decompresses you, gets away from Social Media and online. I mean, you want to talk about the opposite of decompressing and unwinding. It's Social Media. So getting rid of that is huge as well. Just getting outside, being in nature.


Dillon Perron, his wife and son.
Family time - a great way to unwind

Tie: Are you able to find much time to get out herping?


Dillon: Um, not really. It's a bit of a challenge herping here as far as my local area. I can take my son out and we can go look for some frogs and that's pretty much it. One of the things in Manitoba that's really cool, we have the largest garter snake breeding area grounds in the world. So you have these like tens of thousands of garter snakes that gather there every year and this is the sad part I've actually never been there. (laughter) It's like five hours away from where I live so that's something that I eventually will go do and see. We have a cabin that's kind of on a lake an hour and a half from where I live so we'll see garter snakes, sometimes we'll see painted turtles and snapping turtles there as well. We just saw snapping turtle two weeks ago there, which is always fascinating. I don't get out and herp per se anymore, or I haven't in a long time, but I try to put myself in an environment where we're going to run into animals from time to time.


Tie: It's the same thing when you're really busy. (Laughter)


Dillon: Yeah exactly.


Scott: Seeing those garter snake dens is something that I've always wanted to see since I was a kid, seeing it on a documentary when I was about eight years old. You want to go to Canada, babe. That's the one time that I'd go “Yeah, all right, let's go to Canada. That’d be something that I want to see.


Dillon: You guys come here in May and we'll go there together. I've  talked to many people who have been, and it's a fascinating thing. As much as I want to see it, it would be amazing to see those breeding balls, but because those exist here, you see a lot of garter snakes, there'll be years where you just see them all over the place. The property that I grew up on, it's quite large, 14 acres. There's some forest and some grass. And one thing that Dad’s recently done is he's stopped cutting the grass. He has a horse that will kind of manage the grass, but stopped over cutting it like you typically do. And suddenly you have Garter snakes and different animals that have appeared in the grass that we never had before. There's this very large female garter snake that pops up every year. It's just amazing to see her because she'll hunt frogs and Leopard frogs and whatnot in the area. She's just huge for a garter snake and, it just shows you the urbanization of cutting your grass. How much that limits your ability to see these types of things. So, yeah, that'll be my one or two garter snakes that I see a year is normally on the property.


Tie: Canada is really high on my list and it's not quite as high on Scott's list. So hopefully you've just boosted it up his list a little bit Dillon, thank you.


Dillon: There we go, a couple notches up.


Tie: I hope so.


Scott: I'm scared of bears all right. I'm scared of bears. (Laughter)


Dillon: Oh, you'll never see a bear. I should say you rarely see a bear, especially where I am. They're just black bears. So, they're not too bad.


Tie: There you go babe, straight from the horse's mouth. (Laughter)


Dillon: Yeah, as he comes here and gets mauled by a bear. (Laughter)


AI generated photo of Scott Eipper being chased by a bear
What Scott thinks might happen (thanks Canva!) - this is why I edit and Scott doesn't!!!

Tie: It's alright, we'll have travel insurance, it's fine.


Dillon: It's funny that you say that because many Canadians would be terrified of Australia. Poisonous snakes, you know, that's the thing that every non reptile person will say about snakes. So, to hear an Australian who lives in this place where there's lots of animals that could potentially kill you be afraid of the bears, Canadians would get a good kick out of that.


Tie: I must admit, every time one of our kangaroos goes up on social media, I think people think we photoshop them. (laughter)


Dillon: Oh yeah. That's not real. (Laughter)


Tie: I didn't actually know you were scared of bears babe.


Dillon: There we go. New information.


Scott: It's not so much that I'm scared of them…


Tie: Oh no, no. You said scared. Dillon heard it. You said scared. (laughter)


Dillon: It's on the show now. (Laughter)


Scott: It's recorded.


Tie: And that ain't getting edited out. (Laughter)


Scott: That's fine. No, what it is, is it's the same thing with big cats and stuff like that as well. Because we've got nothing here like that. I suppose it's when you grow up around it you understand the reality of it as opposed to the inflamed versions that you see on social media and documentaries and stuff like that.


Dillon: Yeah. Yeah. You're used to the venomous wildlife and we're used to the bears.


Scott: Yeah, that’s it.


Tie: Also too, the venomous wildlife does tend to flee rather than go for conflict. What we see here is a bear on a walk, it goes ya, sort of thing. 


Dillon: Trying to break into your tent!


Scott: Particularly if you position yourself inadvertently between cubs and the mum and stuff like that. But it's certainly not going to stop me herping in a place like that. It'll just be something that I'm a bit cognizant of, I suppose.


Tie: So if I don't come back, you'll know he pushed me in front and ran. (laughter)


Dillon: Yeah, the bear got her. (Laughter)


Scott: You don't have to be the fastest. You just have to be faster than the other people in the party.


Dillon: Exactly.


Tie: Exactly. I can’t run for shit! (Laughter)


Scott: And I suppose that segues nicely across to have you ever experienced a witness misogyny in the hobby, or your career, and what do you think could be done to stamp it out?


Dillon: Well, I think we've definitely seen it in the reptile community. One thing that's interesting is within the last year, I've kind of got into keeping tarantulas. I have two of them. I'm still pretty scared of them. They're sitting just next to me. I find them fascinating, but I definitely have a bit of fear. When I started getting into that hobby and interacting with the online forums or listening to other podcasts, I was amazed at how female dominant it was. Maybe dominant isn't the right word. I would say at least it's equal. It seems like there's a lot of female people that are keeping them. Which to me was very different from the reptile world. It would seem like there was less women involved. I know some amazing women who keep reptiles and I've had them on the podcast and I'm friends with many of them. And, when you get to go to expos, you meet them. How do you stop it? I mean, I don't know. There's a lot of old school tendencies within our hobby that go beyond old school husbandry, we'll call it. It's old school treatment of people and old school mentalities, like egos and what not. I think in many ways, we just kind of have to wait for some of that to extinguish. I think people are being called out now, which helps. Social media is not necessarily the best thing, but it does help people point out, hey, this person is being an asshole and we don't want them in the hobby. I think that's good. I mean, there's all sorts of examples that we've seen of that over the last few years. So, creating that sort of environment, I think is not a bad thing, but I think just fostering interest in the hobby, making sure that people understand that this is not a male hobby. It's a hobby for anybody. There's no difference to me between a female keeper and a male keeper. I have just as equally fascinating conversations with them on the podcast. I think it's a tough problem, but, I want to say it's getting better. Anyway, circling back to the tarantula, I was amazed at that and I feel like that was very promising. Because if I was to pick an animal keeping hobby, that I assume would be not female dominated, it would be keeping spiders and it wasn't. There was a lot of  positive energy from the experience that I was having with that. So hopefully we start to see more of that on the reptile side as well.


Tie: 60 seconds under the basking spot. Dylan, are you ready?


Dillon: I'm ready.


Tie: Coffee or tea?


Dillon: Coffee. I'm drinking tea right now, but I drink coffee. Coffee’s my go to every morning.


Tie: Night owl or early bird?


Dillon: Early bird.


Tie: Savings or spendings?


Dillon: I'm right in between. I'm very good at saving, but I'm also good at pulling the trigger on a thousand dollar purchase for no reason at all.


Tie: Call or text?


Dillon: Call.


Tie: Tidy or messy?


Dillon: Tidy.


Tie: Would you rather time travel to the past or the future?


Dillon: Past.


Tie: Android or Apple?


Dillon: Apple.


Tie: Accomplice or ringleader?


Dillon: Dang, I don't know. I think ringleader.


Tie: Introvert or extrovert?


Dillon: Introvert.


Tie: Would you rather be able to fly or have super strength?


Dillon: Fly.


Tie: Water balloon fight or snowball fight?


Dillon: Water balloon.


Tie: Does pineapple go on a pizza?


Dillon: Yes.


Scott: Excellent, excellent. (Laughter)


Dillon: Is that the right answer?


Scott: That is definitely the right answer if you ask me. Definitely the wrong answer if you ask Tie.


Tie: It makes my mouth go fuzzy, I don’t like it.


Dillon: Oh, are you allergic to it?


Tie: Uh, no, but that's what I tell Dominoes to make sure it doesn't go on there.


Dillon: It's one of the most divisive questions of our time.


Tie: Isn't it? (Laughter)


Scott: It's the epitome of first world problems, isn't it?


Dillon: It really is. But I agree. I love pineapple pizza.


Tie: But God, does it rile people up!


Dillon: I know. Yeah. It's funny.  (Laughter)


Scott: So, we were just talking about takeaways, what is the one takeaway that you would like the listeners to take away from this episode?


Dillon: I think the main takeaway that I like to leave people with is keeping reptiles is a spectrum. The way you keep reptiles now, hopefully is not the way you're going to keep them in two or three years from now, and that you should remain open minded. There are things that we have done in the past as far as husbandry is concerned, though it works, it's not the best way, or potentially the science based way. Now, there's a big spectrum of ways people can keep, but keeping open minded  and committing to the idea of progressing, I think, is the most important thing you can do when you're keeping animals. Our hobby involves other beings. It's not collecting model cars or painting little figurines. We do have heartbeats in our rooms and these are creatures are living and breathing. You don't have to say that they're a anthropomorphic thing that you're keeping. People constantly will accuse, not necessarily me of that, but people who think this way, but they are beings. They have a life and we have to respect that life as much as possible. Committing to the idea of progressing and when you are able to, when you have time or the money to make a change, you should do it. You and your animal will benefit from it. Especially when you make a change, I always say this, your animal will reward you with that change because you'll start to see these fascinating behaviours that maybe you were missing before, because you didn't give them the opportunity to do that. And suddenly you're going to see a little more nature in your home than you had before. And I think that's the name of the game when it comes to keeping reptiles.


Scott: The five freedoms definitely apply to reptile keeping as well. It's not restricted just to other animals. I think that's something that people need to remember.


Dillon: Yeah, absolutely. They do get left out of that conversation because of the old school  kind of these are not much more than an insect as far as intellectual ability and they're not really aware of what's going on. Yes, they're in a dark hole and they don't care, but really they do have an intellectual capacity to learn and experience something. I'm not saying they can experience their world like a human can, but there's some sort of experience there. So, if you can provide them with more choice, it's going to benefit them.


Tie: We know a lot more than we did say 50 years ago. So, in that train of thought, there's still a lot more to come. Which revolves back to give them the room to move, alter their diet where possible, give them the light that they would have in the wild, et cetera, et cetera.


Dillon: Exactly. Yeah, totally.


Tie: Is there anything we haven't covered that you would like to say before we close out?


Dillon: I don't think so. I think again, I'm just so thankful that you guys had me on. It's always nice to talk to other people in the hobby and to other podcasters as well. And for the listeners, if they're interested in checking out the show, they can do that at Animals at Home Network. Just search that on Google. You'll find it on YouTube, or the website or Spotify. And yeah, I think that's it from me.


Scott: We're going to have it in the show notes as well.


Dillon: Perfect.


Tie: Thanks for listening to the Cold-blooded Contributions podcast. A massive thank you to our guest Dillon Perron from the Animals at Home podcast. We appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to us. Usually, we'll be releasing our podcast monthly so make sure you follow us so you don't miss out on an episode. Give the Cold-blooded Contributions podcast a like on Facebook so you don't miss any updates, giveaways or guest announcements. The links discussed in today's podcast will be in the show notes. And always remember to trust your creativity, it's intelligence having fun.


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Dillon from Animals At Home can be found on:



Nature 4 You (Scott and Tie)

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Nature 4 You’s Podcast: Cold-blooded Contributions


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