INTERVIEW: These terrarium designers love their ‘Scaled’ friends

Photo: Scaled is a new reality series on Animal Planet that looks at the life of terrarium designers. Photo courtesy of Animal Planet / Provided with permission.

Animal Planet is set to premiere Scaled, its new reality show about a team of terrarium designers, Friday, Aug. 24 at 9 p.m. On the series, Greg West and his staff at Cornel’s World make their clients’ reptile dreams come true with one-of-a-kind enclosures that cater to frogs, lizards and snakes. Oh my!

“This business is really my passion,” West said in a recent phone interview. “For myself personally, my parents were really open to experiencing different animals. Right when I was about 10 or 12, I had my first little lizard, and then once I moved out and was on my own in college, I didn’t have any limits. So then I started collecting frogs and chameleons and other lizards, and basically once I graduated college, I started into a job that lended me the opportunity to start buying glass for fairly affordable rates. And then I decided that maybe I should be doing this for a living and started building reptile cages out of my home.”

From those early days, Cornel’s World was developed, and now West and his wife, Elaine, have joined up with a team of master builders and designers. Helping with moral support is the company’s mascot, a three-legged bearded dragon named Kevin.

“I would say, for the most part, it’s usually people who do have experience that we deal with, but there generally are also people that we like to educate a little bit,” he said. “A lot of people, because terrariums aren’t as readily available, have been keeping their animals in aquariums, and those aren’t always the best suited for reptiles.”

When designing the enclosures, West and the team have a lot of concerns to keep in mind. He called it a “delicate balance” of meeting the requirements of the human clients and meeting the requirements of the animals.

“The best thing for us is trying to mimic their natural environment as much as possible,” he said. “We need to meet the requirements based on heat, humidity, lighting and then just overall size of the enclosure. We want to make sure that the animals are going to be happy and healthy in whatever we provide, so we need to make sure that it’s big enough first off.”

In West’s work, he sees ball pythons as the most popular reptile to have at home. However, he also said good pets for first-time owners are leopard geckos and bearded dragons.

“We get some crazy requests from time to time, but generally it’s more geared toward the animals that are readily available within the reptile industry,” said West, who has a veiled chameleon, poison dart frogs, Hermann’s tortoises, leaf frogs and armadillo girdled lizards at home. “But some people are very specialized, so we have had some requests doing builds for venomous snakes and crocodiles and caimans. We haven’t landed any of those larger projects at this point that deal with really large animals, but I think the biggest reptiles that we’ve dealt with are Burmese pythons and bigger snakes.”

There are going to be those viewers who tune into Scaled and appreciate West’s work, but still think that reptiles are icky creatures that do not make good pets. Many people strive to stay away from snakes, frogs and lizards — not invite them into their homes. West knows this, but he said the stigma is decreasing with each passing year.

“The stigma is out there, for sure, still, but it’s not as bad as it used to be,” he said. “I think the education is really getting out there that there is a lot of great reptile pets that can be had and that can be cared for quite easily, and a lot of these reptiles now are bred in captivity. They’re not being taken from the wild as they used to be because they are becoming way more mainstream, so that’s great to see as well, that these animals are being bred in captivity. I would say that that’s a benefit showing that people are caring for them properly because if these animals are breeding in captivity, they’re obviously happy and healthy and able to breed. So that’s a good sign.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Scaled will premiere Friday, Aug. 24 at 9 p.m. on Animal Planet. Click here for more information.