Pets Snakes vs Pet Lizards for Beginner Reptile Keepers 🐍🆚🦎 - Which is Best for You?

Hey, guys, Jennii from Tye-Dyed Iguana. I'm here today to kind of explain whether or  not it's good to have a snake as your first pet or if it's good to have a  lizard as your first pet, so let's get started. As you can see here, snakes are really really calm, or at least this guy is. This is a ball python. This is one of our party animals,  so he's used to being held a lot. Snakes in general  are a little more off hands. They only need to really be interacted  with whenever you go to feed them.

You can interact with them a little bit more,  but they don't necessarily need it as much. Snakes are just really awesome as a good pet, especially ball pythons. They are very very calm, very sweet. So the really nice thing about having a snake as  a starter pet is it's really easy to get their diet right cuz they get fed one thing, and it's a rat or  a mouse depending on the size of your snake, and you only get to feed them  once a week, so that's nice, so you don't have to worry  about feedin

g them as often. You don't have to worry about, you know, you don't have to worry about them  making such a mess with pooping, but whenever they do, they do make a mess, but it's not as often as, like, say, a lizard. It's usually just, like, in one chunk, and the worst that they could do is  maybe smear it around a little bit, but usually it's just one pile and it's done. So they're easy to clean up after, their water dish usually doesn't  become a mess very easily. They don't., you know...mayb

e push a little  bit of substrate into the water dish, but usually they just crawl right  into it and then crawl back out, so they don't usually make quite a mess. They're a little less interactive,  so you're not gonna get as much, say, personality out of them. At most, like, say, a corn snake or a king  snake, they'll be a little bit more wriggly and a little bit harder to  handle but still handleable. But as you can see here, Jake just chills. So they're fun to, like, play video games with, w

atch some TV. I think Jake wants to go back, so let's  move on to the next pet which is a lizard. All right, and so, yeah, here we have our lizard. This is Jack. He's one of our party animals again. He is a Rankin's Dragon. The really nice thing about having lizards  as a first pet is they're super interactive, they have a lot more personality. As you can see, he's just kind of,  like, looking around right now. And they eat a lot more,  so you can watch them eat. People like watching them eat.

I love watching them eat,  and they're just really cool. Like, you'll put them down. He'll just look around. He'll hang out and do little things like that. Like I said earlier, lizards  tend to be a lot more personable, have a lot more personality, but there is a spectrum of lizards. On the friendly end, you've  got your Rankin's dragons here. He's just... obviously just wanting to get away. You got your bearded dragons. Same thing. Leopard geckos. Crested geckos. Those are the more friendly liz

ards  that can be interacted with little to no stress on the animal and you. So yeah. Lizards that tend to not be  as much interactable or personable, it's a little bad of an example, but blue tongue skinks. Bert here has been with us for, what? 16 years, something like that. So he's, you know, learned to trust us. I mean, you know, he can be really calm, but for the most time they usually  are very hissy, very attitude-driven. They can... they can be cool, but they can also be just... yeah, t

hey can also be very temperamental. We'll say, like, on that same spectrum  of, like, possibly cool, possibly not cool are your butterfly agamas. We have those in. Sometimes they can be very flighty the majority of the time. They don't really give attitude.  They're just very skittish, so they tend to not make the best personable pet, but they're really cool-looking. Another, like, slightly personable  lizard but also not very interactable just because they're very  skittish: your day geckos li

ke our giant day gecko or gold dust  day geckos, all those good stuff. They can be tameable. You can tong feed them. You can get them to crawl onto your hand,  but they're usually very flighty, skittish, so normally you just don't want to handle them. But they're very pretty and really really cool. At the very bottom of that totem pole we've  got the ones with the most amount of attitude. Veiled chameleons are notorious  for having bad attitudes. I have seen once a blue moon a  very handleable v

eiled chameleon, but it's, like, one in a million, so  they tend to just hiss, stay away. They don't really like interaction, so we call them furniture animals. I would say, yeah, your basilisk. Well, at least the one that  we have , he's not very friendly. His name's Dobby. He... he knows what he wants,  he knows what he likes, and he'll let you know for sure. Definitely no interaction. He will either  whip you with his tail, bite you, or just run across the store. It's pretty funny. And then l

ast but not least, probably  the more famous one are tokay geckos. They're gorgeous, gorgeous lizards. They're, you know, purple or blue with,  like, these orange and almost yellow spots, but they're terrible at interaction. You go near one, they will bite  you, and they will not let go. They would rather fight than flight. So they do make good furniture pets, but  they do not make great interaction pets. And the really nice thing  about lizards is they're... I like the little kissies... they co

me in all shapes and colors and sizes. I mean, so do snakes, but  there's so many more lizards. So those are the pros of having a lizard. So the downside to having a lizard  as a pet is they do eat a lot more. You will be needing to feed them every day, especially if they're a baby. Sometimes every other day. They will consume a lot more food, and they also have varied diets. Some are insectivores, so  they'll only eat crickets, and then some are also omnivores so they'll  eat crickets and... or

, like, insects and vegetables like your turnip greens, collard  greens, green beans, all that good stuff. So there's, you know, that aspect of it. The other thing is since  they are a lot more active, they tend to make a mess of the cage a lot more. They'll poop somewhere and then  they'll just fling it across the cage. Not like they're trying to make a  mess, but, you know, it happens, especially if you don't catch  them pooping right away. They'll make a mess of your  water dish a lot more ea

sily, so you'll pretty much be having to clean that,  like, once if not sometimes twice a day. But yeah, in general, the majority of lizards require just a little bit more  care than what a snake would, but I feel like their personality makes up for it. So that's the difference between having a  lizard as a first pet or a snake as a first pet. Which one would you like to start with?