The ‘secret life’ of Garry and his exotic pets

AMONG the many things that annoy me in the modern world are self-help manuals.

Train Your Brain To Think After Death, This Is Effective DecisionMaking (Or Is It?), Release Your Inner Potato-Picker – that sort of nonsense.

Most contain merely one idea which could be expressed within a few words: retain self control, always concentrate, try hard, be bold, pick lots of potatoes.

But that idea is spread through an entire book, repetitively giving example after example.

Don’t waste money on this simulated wisdom, the real thing can be found in real books.

If you’re looking for an example of perseverance try Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. For courage, be amazed by the miners in Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong.

Almost any Dickens novel tells how to deal with difficult people, though I’d suggest Great Expectations as a starting point.

Atticus Finch, in To Kill A Mockingbird, demonstrates all you need to know about quiet strength of character. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four shows what freedom is. The list is endless.

There’s the bonus of getting to read wonderful stories and meet the famous figures of fiction.

Wisdom is more memorable when clothed in fine words.

GARRY MURPHY has always been an animal lover – and always had pets.

He grew up surrounded by every kind of furry friend and reptile imaginable, from dogs and fish to parrots and rats.

But when he was a teenager, Garry got a pet snake, and he’s never really been without one since.

And he loved them so much that he started breeding them as a hobby, so the slithery characters multiplied in numbers.

Garry’s animals don’t live in a zoo... they take up residence in his back garden!

For years, the 41-year-old, from Alva, Clackmannanshire, has shared his semi-detatched home not only with his wife and two kids, but more than 60 snakes – some 20ft long – and three Argentinian tegus.

Of course, his neighbours already thought he was mad.

But Garry took his hobby a step further when he recently welcomed two caiman crocodiles to the clan, after being granted a licence which allows him to keep the exotic animals as pets.

He’s believed to be only the second person in Scotland granted permission to keep alligators and crocs.

And as news spreads, he is being hailed the country’s answer to Steve Irwin. He even shares the same birthday as the Aussie Crocodile Hunter.

Forget Crocodile Dundee... now it’s Crocodile Clackmannanshire!

Construction manager Garry is housing the carnivorous predators in a purpose-built enclosure he has already created for the snakes in his back garden.

But he’s planning to build a pond, which will give them more space as they grow.

The baby crocs are only about 10 inches long at the moment, but fully grown they’ll reach several metres in length… so he’d better make it snappy!

Overall, it’s a pretty unusual pet. But, to Garry, keeping crocs feels just as normal as having a dog or a cat. In his opinion, they were all wild animals at one point.

His snake keeping has been such a success that we can only imagine their new companions will feel just as at home.

Even if it takes a while, crocodile!