Tom Crutchfield

Principal Advisor

Breeding · Herpetology · Reptile history · Venomous

Crutchfield Reptiles

Born in Marianna, in the Florida panhandle. His first snake was a ringneck he kept in a jar and tried to feed cheese. As a teenager he worked the reptile attractions of old Florida, including Ross Allen's Reptile Institute at Silver Springs, where at seventeen he was milking rattlesnakes in front of the public. The shows turned into buying and selling, then breeding, and that's been his whole career. He got the federal import and export license and went around the world collecting. Aldabra tortoises and the first Phelsuma out of the Seychelles. Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore. A trade with the government of Sri Lanka where he handpicked animals from the national zoo. He found his first rhinoceros iguana in Haiti in the 1970s. The species has been captive-bred in this country ever since. That's conservation through commercialization. At the height of his business he had seven or eight thousand reptiles and a crocodile farm on forty acres, with nearly every major zoo in America as a customer. He imported the first crocodile monitors in the 1980s and, decades later, proved they could be tamed. He developed the albino and crimson iguana lines and wrote a book. In more than fifty years of handling venomous snakes he has never once needed antivenom.

Tom Crutchfield is Principal Advisor and a member of the faculty at Citadel Culebra, the online school of reptile-keeping, and is associated with Crutchfield Reptiles.

Find Tom at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Crutchfield · instagram.com/crutchfieldreptilefarm · facebook.com/tom.crutchfield1