AMAZONAS
We had a miniature horse, a pot-bellied pig, an ostrich,
and many other animals that were seldom seen in pet
shops. I actually took the miniature horse for a walk one
day and decided I was hungry, so the horse and I walked
into a McDonald’s and I ordered lunch. The crew at the
counter didn’t know what to say, but I got my lunch
without any problems.
When I was 19, a friend of mine who worked with
a tropical fish wholesaler in Los Angeles was quitting
to open a store in San Diego. I applied for his job and
got it. Now I was selling tropical fishes in both Orange
County (where I lived) and San Diego County. I refused
to allow the crew at the wholesaler pack fishes for my
customers, so I drove to Los Angeles each night to do
it myself and was back on the road the next day sell-
ing more fishes. I was only getting about three hours of
sleep per night, and one night I was so tired I dropped
a bucket of 200 Neon Tetras from the top of a ladder. I
quickly retrieved them, but this made me think, “This
job is going to kill me!” So on my fish route I started
selling live reptiles, which all my customers had been
asking for, and I was so successful that in 1977 I quit the
fish-selling job and started a live import/export reptile
company, which later became Zoo Med Labs, Inc.
The first name of my company was In Cold Blood
(after the 1966 Truman Capote bestselling book of the
same name) because reptiles are ectotherms (cold-
blooded). When I picked up my shipments of live rep-
tiles from the freight terminals in Los Angeles the work-
ers at the receiving desk did not share my humor (“I’m
here to pick up reptiles for In Cold Blood”), so I changed
the name to Orange County Zoological Supply andeventually to California Zoological Supply. I spent
my twenties traveling all over the world, procur-
ing reptiles for “Cal Zoo.” I traveled to Honduras,
Mexico, Suriname, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Nigeria,
Western Samoa, and Egypt. The king of Western
Samoa signed our paperwork to export Pacific
Island Boas and Coconut Crabs, and I was the
first person to import Egyptian Uromastyx lizards
and Egyptian Tortoises from Egypt. Cal Zoo also brought
in the first four albino Boa Constrictors from Colombia,
from which all albino and albino morphs in the pet
trade are descended. I loved traveling and immersing my-
self in the live reptile business, but one day something
odd happened.From livestock to dry goods
One of Cal Zoo’s good customers was a man named
Mike Verner, who would put P. T. Barnum to shame.
Mike was a genius at self-promotion and ran an aquar-
ium and reptile shop that was second to none. His shop
was one of the first to offer fully set-up vivariums with
arrow frogs in them, and he sold setups that looked like
something straight out of the Amazon rainforest. One
day Mike walked into Zoo Med, placed a bottle of his
ReptiVite reptile vitamins on my desk, and asked if I
wanted to sell them. I laughed and said, “Who’s going
to buy reptile vitamins?” I’ve never forgotten his reply:
“Gary, vitamins don’t die, they don’t defecate, and they
let you go home on weekends.” Now, anyone in the live
animal business knows that the hours are very long—as
in 12+ hours per day, 7 days a week. Live animals do not
know when it’s a weekend or a holiday; they must be
cleaned, watered, and fed every single day.
I agreed to try to sell the vitamins, and that is how
Zoo Med started. Pet shops quickly embraced this prod-
uct, and soon they were asking for more reptile products.
It didn’t take long for me to buy out Mike’s business
(excellent bird and reptile vitamins), and I quickly added
reptile posters, driftwood, the “Log Cabin Terrarium and
Aquarium” (a hollowed-out tree trunk with a windowTurtle Nirvana, Zoo Med’s
2,000-square-foot climate-
controlled greenhouse, houses
our large breeding stock of
aquatic turtles and tortoises.