Animal Encounters

Fancy stroking a snake, loving a lizard, or just cuddling a guinea pig? Try Celebrity Reptiles Animal Encounters for a meeting full of fun. Cost is around £100 an hour for this area of the country, but as the people have a background in Scouting as well as doing schools, children's parties and corporate events, they came to our Brownie meeting for just £40!

Our evening was absolutely brilliant - rarely have the Brownies been so quiet and attentive! We started with giant millipedes; more than enough to go around and fascinating to feel hanging on to your skin like velcro! We then moved on to giant snails weighing up to a kilo (the same as a bag of sugar), and a hissing cockroach from Madagascar.

We then had the opportunity to touch and stroke guinea pigs, a tortoise (the second largest type in the world which grows to a metre long) and a baby hedgehog. The hedgehog proved to be the scariest of the animals we encountered; as Martin explained it was growing a new set of prickles so was quite vunerable, and reacted to our stroking by jumping up at us!

We then met two small lizards, one of which took a liking to the Rabbit Six and seemed to want to kiss them on the cheek. Martin explained that, like other reptiles, these sensed their surroundings through their tongues and they weren't therefore licking, but smelling the Brownies!

Another round of handwash later and we moved on to the snake - a constrictor but we were told not to worry - easy to say, not so easy to do! The trick apparently is not to hold a snake, but to let the snake hold you! Our final encounter was the iguana which a remarkable number of Brownies wanted to take home as a pet - mums weren't quite so sure!

A really great evening and we ran out of time before we'd seen all the animals. Absolutely no risk to the Brownies - in fact we had more adults at the back of the room than Brownies!

Contact info@celebrityreptiles.co.uk or have a look at their website.

Webmaster - March 2007

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