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Published: 27 January, 2012
by JOSH LOEB

THEY have a reputation as venomous predators with toxic saliva, terrible breath and serrated teeth to tear through flesh – not everyone’s idea of a loveable pet – but to see reptile expert Glynn Hennessy interact with London’s two komodo dragons, you would think these carnivorous lizards were as friendly as a well-trained dog.

Mr Hennessy, a senior keeper who has worked at London Zoo since 1995, looks after Raja and his attractive female companion, Rinca.

While many people would run a mile from komodo dragons, which in the wild have been known to attack and eat people, Mr Hennessy happily pets them and lets them sniff his hand with their tongues.

Raja, a stocky 12-year-old with his own Facebook page, and Rinca – of the two, she is Mr Hennessy’s favourite – are part of a breeding programme that it is hoped could yield a clutch of baby dragons this year.

However, breeding komodo dragons is a complicated business.

The world’s biggest lizard is an endangered species, meaning permission must be sought from a studbook keeper in Rotterdam before any reptilian rumpy pumpy can take place.

The studbook keeper also looks after komodo dragon matchmaking – his little black book contains the vital stats of all captive komodos.

Once he has given the zoo the green light, the young couple get the chance to get acquainted.

It can be a violent affair, but luckily komodo dragons’ skin has remarkable healing properties.

Mr Hennessy says: “What initially happens is that there is a big face off with lots of huffing and puffing.”

No fire is involved.

“He has to overpower her. She’ll put up a good fight – she is probably the strongest female we have ever had, certainly the largest. They go up on their hind legs and sort of intertwine.

“That can go on for an hour, but in the end what will happen is one will tire out or the female will become very submissive, close her eyes and there will be a lot of tongue flicking.

He has to almost spin the back part of her body up, and that’s quite tricky for him. But he has done it before with other females.

“They can be so aggressive towards each other that they have a whole body of armour – they have bone fragments in their skin.”

Raja and Rinca were both captive born. The former came from a zoo in Miami, while the latter was born in Pretoria. In the wild the animals come from a string of Indonesian islands, where they are threatened because of habitat loss.

Komodo dragons are unusual in that they can also reproduce asexually via parthenogenesis – so-called virgin births that can produce offspring genetically identical to their mother.

Eggs must be incubated, Jurassic Park-style, for up to seven months. London Zoo has successfully hatched komodo dragons in the past, and the hatchings can be a handful.

“When we had the juveniles, other people from other zoos came here to train with us because we were one of the first to have them,” says Mr Hennessy. “One person was trying to catch a juvenile and it bit her. She was so paranoid about it that she went to the doctor, and he said ‘Have you been cut by a scalpel?’”

However, the animals are currently in high demand in the zookeeping world.

“There is a waiting list for komodo dragons,” says Mr Hennessy, whose father was a zookeeper and who worked as a volunteer at London Zoo before eventually being taken on full time to do what must at one stage or another be every child’s dream job.

He says he loves looking after the dragons as they are intelligent and interact with keepers in a way that other reptiles such as snakes don’t.

By going into their enclosures and building a rapport with them he has trained them to feel comfortable around him – a good job too as he must regularly get up close to them in order to take blood to check that they are getting enough ultraviolet light or to remove bits of old skin the dragons have shed.

• London Zoo is run by charity ZSL and receives on government funding. It is currently running a scheme whereby members of the public can help pay for the komodo dragons’ food and keep by adopting Raja online. £24 gets you regular email updates from Raja’s keepers, photographs of Raja, a subscription to the zoo’s magazine Wild About and a free e-ticket to the zoo. For more information see www.zsl.org/shop/
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