Forty-four years of life in the Prague Zoo, hundreds of species, thousands of animals – and above all, an unceasing fascination with the world of reptiles and amphibians. Curator Petr Velenský is a legend who changed the way we look at these often underestimated creatures. It tells about how childhood admiration for snakes gave birth to a lifelong passion, about the mental life of reptiles, about why today dominance in breeding is replaced by respect and partnership.
You have been working at the Prague Zoo for decades. When did you first realize that you were attracted to the animal world?
I have been at the zoo for more than forty-four years. From the age of fifteen I went to the zoo to help the reptile keeper. But I had a relationship with animals much earlier. I then spent part of my childhood with my parents in Tunis, where my dad coached the national basketball team. We often went to the sea and I spent days wading in the surrounding natural, overgrown dunes, where many animals lived. Mom was very perceptive, sensitive and always supported us children in our interests. After returning from Tunis, she bought me professional literature, signed me up for a breeding club, and allowed me to have snakes in my home, even though she hated them. So I owe her who I am.
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Why have you been interested in reptiles and amphibians since childhood?
I can’t say that. But I started at the zoo as a ungulate keeper, then I worked as a bird keeper for a long time, and I moved from district to district because of allergies. But I always felt that the animals I worked with had my admiration and my whole heart. I think that every person who is a little bit sensitive to animals perceives the whole of nature as a fascinating matter, animals and plants, you can’t even separate them… So, with the passage of time, I see it more as an interest in nature as a whole. But I understand reptiles the most, in depth, so of course they are my passion.
You often talk about the “rich reptilian mental life”. How can they surprise you the most?
When I was growing up and studying books about reptiles, the implication was that snakes follow instinct. That they are the kind of machines that you pull up and they go according to how they are programmed. I took it, I liked them as wonderful creations of nature, but I did not think that they were gifted with any higher mental abilities, let alone emotions.
But then you have a wild Cuban iguana in the atrium in the pavilion and you gradually develop a relationship with it. He comes first for food and then suddenly only for you. And then, to your great astonishment, you discover that it is a friend and that he exhibits behavior that is difficult to explain on an instinctive basis. This was first shown to me by the Cuban iguana Pepíno, and then automatically by large turtles. It is different with crocodiles, they are predators. He keeps his distance. And I always say they are too smart to relate to their biggest predator.
Can you understand snakes?
We have never understood reptiles very well, we can establish bonds with the animals that are closest to us. We understand the emotions of primates, we understand the dog because it lives with us for a long time. But when you look at a turtle, which has no emotion and is developmentally more distant from us, it’s more tempting to underestimate it and say, after all, it’s just a living shell. The snake lives a solitary and mostly hidden way of life, when it is on the surface of the earth, it is often eaten or killed. So it’s more difficult there to see if he has some degree of ability to learn something. But studies from nature reveal something. In the zoo, based on the observation of our rattlesnakes, we found out with amazement how much they understand space, the environment, what kind of memory they have.
You mention that in the 1980s animals were more “dominated”, but you prefer a partnership and communication approach. How do you think breeding has changed over the years?
Zookeeping has gone through a rocket revolution. It wasn’t even evolution. Now we are sitting here at the terrarium with the gavials (kind of crocodile, editor’s note)and if you look up to the ceiling, there are hitech lamps hanging there, one thousand and two thousand watts. Both batches develop full sunlight including the UV component. This is something that would have been absolutely impossible in my early days. We would breed in a much smaller and darker space. Now here we see them swimming in clear water. In other words, the technical conditions have fundamentally changed. Considering the needs of animals and understanding their habits.
And now I have to mention my wife, Natasha, who is of course important to me and also works all her life at the zoo. She is a breeder of large turtles. When we got married, we did a double interview for Young World, and she said then that she has a partnership approach to animals. And I, on the other hand, said that I, as a man, must dominate the animals so that they do what I want as a breeder. Today I must humbly say that her approach was correct and that I also accepted it, because dominance is not necessary at all. We had to teach the breeder – earlier, the breeder came to a big turtle, wanted to clean it, and when the turtle was sitting on the droppings, he picked it up and moved it. The current approach is that if the turtle is sitting on the dung, we leave it there and clean it up maybe tomorrow. The animal is more important than the drained floor.
The story of the Komodo dragons in the Prague Zoo is linked to your name. What was behind the famous breeding success of breeding monitor lizards, which only succeeded in a few zoos in the world?
I must point out that we have not been breeding monitor lizards since 2017, because the breeding of such animals is subject to European coordination and our line has prevailed in Europe to such an extent that it was decided to suppress it and give priority to other lines. Which is not very successful because other gardens do not yet have the know-how at such a high level as we do here. In the Czech Republic, there is a very good, long, solid breeding tradition, which results from private breeding, and I underline that. I myself come from the private breeding sector, my know-how draws a lot from what I learned in my childhood in animal circles and then also here at the zoo during my internships. I think institutions are missing this underbelly.
It doesn’t work that they get a manual like a washing machine – how to breed monitor lizards and do it accordingly. Varans are specific. Like all reptiles, they have a preferred body temperature, when their metabolism runs best, the lizard climbs out in the morning and goes to warm up in the sun, but the Komodo dragon has a different thing. It heats up to a temperature that is five degrees lower than it needs, then it activates normally, and Komoda’s hot environment reaches the optimal temperature for its metabolism during the day. When we give him a lamp in the zoo to warm up under, he warms up to that temperature 5 degrees lower and keeps it all day. It is basically hypothermic. The metabolism is disturbed, it concerns the reproduction, longevity, health, manifestations of those animals…
So we started heating the entire space for them, which is difficult both technically and economically. A lot of zoos didn’t want to do it, but we believed in it. The second component of monitor lizard breeding is the hodokvas feeding system and fasting. We feed a group of our monitor lizards once every five to six weeks. The subsequent fast is then just as important for them as the feast. And then there is a third prerequisite for successful breeding, and that is courage. Varans are dragons, they have a dragon’s nature, they do not feel pain, they often fight, and if the institution does not have the courage, then it will not even be possible to connect a male with a female. Courtship often turns into aggressive behavior and it is necessary to observe it, understand it and intervene only at the right moment… We take it to mean that varans are dragons and do not look at a scar. It’s part of their life and we can’t take it away from them.
What have reptiles and amphibians taught you over the years about respect, patience, observation, empathy?
An important aspect of keeping these animals is curiosity. When you want to understand how it all works and the more you delve into it, the more you admire it. I feel great admiration for the order that has been established in that animal kingdom, but at the same time it is constantly changing, I feel great humility and also great joy that I have been allowed to live the life that I live. My wife and I go on holiday to look for reptiles in nature, we observe them in their environment, we photograph them… We like drier landscapes, i.e. the areas around the Mediterranean Sea, the Caucasus, the deserts of North Africa or Central Asia. Very often we return to similar places, because the events suddenly begin to open up to you more than when you were there the first time.
You have experienced countless challenges and joys – is there a moment when you said to yourself: Was this all worth it?
Yes, I have such a moment. The feeling of satisfaction relates to the water turtle, which we have bred for the first time in the world. First world breeding, that’s simply prestige. At the same time, we managed to discover a very unusual way of reproduction of this crowned turtle, or in Latin hardelly – her eggs need to spend part of their development in water. It would kill the embryos of other reptiles because they breathe atmospheric air through vents in their shell. They always lay their eggs on dry land, often in sand.
Hardellas repeatedly laid eggs in our water at the zoo, which we read as being insecure and shedding their eggs. But when I watched them, it occurred to me that they do not get rid of the clutch, that their laying behavior has a head and a tail, that they lower the eggs into the water through their hind legs, as if carefully, with empathy… I consulted their behavior continuously with a colleague from India, the greatest expert on hardellas in the world, who, although he claimed that according to scientists, hardellas do not take to water, but he mentioned that fishermen often found turtle eggs near the shore in a mess of aquatic plants.
At that moment, I began to study the conditions in the river system under the influence of the monsoon, which raises the river level by 5 to 10 meters and floods the shallows. I thought we’d simulate this: a hardella lays her eggs in the water, the water recedes, the eggs are on land, then they’re flooded again. So we kept the eggs in water for two months, then dried them and put them in a wine cooler to simulate a northern Indian winter. Then we put the eggs in the incubator and waited to see what would happen. The very first clutch was successful. It was clear that this is how nature really works. It was a lifetime satisfaction for me.
What about your colleague from India?
When the first hardella hatched, I immediately texted him. Then again. But he nothing. He didn’t answer. I learned in retrospect that he was no longer alive at that time. He died while working on the conservation of gharials, which was his next subject. But whenever I give a lecture on hardellas, there is a portrait of him, in his honor, because we were involved in that discovery together.
What would you like the visitor to take away from the Prague Zoo after meeting your wards?
The visitor is as important to us as our animals, and we try to make him either subconsciously or consciously receive information about the animals, or perhaps just perceive the environment. In the end, it connects to him and he leaves with the feeling that the zoo was nice, and includes, for example, the gavial, the crocodile, which we are now looking at together during the conversation. What I would like visitors to take away is precisely that reptiles are a fascinating and integral part of nature and that we should co-exist with them in peace. Because then when they see a snake or a bat in the garden, they will be glad to have them there. I have dedicated my whole life to getting people to like or at least tolerate reptiles.
I have a personal, initiation experience for this, which I started talking about relatively recently, because it was very painful. I was twelve or thirteen years old, I was in a cottage, and fifteen-year-old village boys came towards me, holding blind men in their hands. I rushed to them because I wanted to admire him. But the boy who was holding it broke it in front of me. This killed him because the blind man actually has a bone shell. It totally shocked me. In the evening, I explained it to my mother, and my mother told me: You see, when you grow up, you can make sure that this does not happen. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do all my life.
You could find this article in the magazine Recipe No. 11/25.
