Snakes Alive! Meet the Reptiles at the Iowa State Fair

[Tom Weidner] The name of the exhibit is Snakes Alive. We put on approximately 50 reptiles from around the world, most of them exotic stuff. We rarely show anything that's native to Iowa. We try to bring stuff that's interesting, exciting, colorful. And then when you're all done looking at all the animals, you can get your picture taken with a big Burmese Python.

[Nick Blay] Like when you're at the fairgrounds, You see, you know, cattle, pigs, horses, sheep, all the stuff. But then like you walk down the sidewalk and you end up here and you're like, “Whoa, hold up, that's something I'm not like super familiar with.” You get kids that are just out here bouncing up and down because it's like, it's the coolest thing ever.

But then you have the other side of the spectrum where it's like maybe it's the little kids that really want to come in here, but then the parents are the ones being drug in here. You know, they might tell us right at the ticket window, “Ugh, I hate snakes.” And by the time they get to the end, I get more questions from the parents about, now their curiosity has been sparked.

[Tom] I keep reptiles. I breed snakes. I've done this since I was 7 years old, and I'm not going to tell you how far back that was, but that was a long time ago. I traditionally bring most of my stuff on the Saturday before the fair. The big snakes, most of the venomous stuff, I bring them in.

I don't want them sitting out here any longer than they have to be. I put them in relatively small cages than what I would normally keep them in, just because we only had so much building space here. So to get as much stuff in here as we could, we kind of made the cages smaller than I would prefer them to be.

So yeah, at home they've got a lot nicer environment.

So we've been at it forever. There were 4 of us that started up in the Grandstand, as a matter of fact. That was 51 years ago. I have two other partners now that used to work for me out here, and now we've made them— I've made them partners in this exhibit. And the three of us keep all of these animals.

Zach, who is one of the guys, one of his primary interests is in lizards, so he keeps a number of lizards. And he's got the Gila monster. Nick, who is from Columbia, Missouri, is a professor at Missouri University.

He and I are kind of on the same wavelength in what we like and what we keep.

[Nick] It's funny because when people get the opportunity to interact with an animal, they get an appreciation for it. They make a connection with that organism. And the reason why I continue to be involved in this is the education aspect of it. I mean, I'm an educator, so that's kind of like my big kick for this.

[Tom] But I think a lot of people are amazed at what they see inside here because you're going to see things and you get up pretty close to this stuff. It's just not stuff you're going to see every day.

[Nick] Yeah, they have to earn their rent, but at the same time, they get to kick back for the whole rest of the year and just get ready for the next year.

[Tom] You know, we didn't know what was going to happen when we started this whole thing. The opportunity presented itself to be out here, so we thought we'd give it a try. We run several thousand people through this thing every year, so it's a pretty popular exhibit. And my goal above all is to make sure, hopefully, when you leave here, the next time you see a snake in the wild, you admire it and leave it alone.

[Photographer] All right, guys, look right here. 1, 2, 3, smile. And keep looking.