How it all started

It all started when I was 7 years old and my father found a police radio in a newspaper called the Yellow Pages. He was going to go and buy it, but instead came home with a king boa, a boa constrictor. Mom yelled that if he brought it into the house, she would move. Dad took it into an outdoor storage room. It was a heated storage room. After a while we acquired several boa constrictors and only months later we had about 10. 

One really cold winter, the power went out in the storeroom, dad quickly brought the snakes into the house. On that road it is. It didn't stop until we had almost over 100 reptiles inside the house. We had ball pythons, boa constrictors, rainbow boas, garter snakes, king snakes etc. In my room I had fire-bellied toads, salamanders, skinks, bearded dragons, frilled lizards and many more reptiles.

We became members of Örebro terrarium club and later Sweden's national herpetological association.

I spent my entire upbringing reading books about reptiles, catching snakes, lizards and frogs in the wild to study them. I catched insects behind our house for our insect-eating reptiles. I lectured in schools about reptiles.

After a few years, my father started a reptile shop where they sold reptiles, accessories and food for the reptiles.

In my late teens, a friend and I rented a room to keep all the reptiles we had. My best friend had also become interested in reptiles. There we built terrariums, raised mice and rats and had lots of snakes. We built the terrarium adapted to the animal that would live there. We built with glass and wood, we used styrofoam to create different background environments depending on where the animal lived in the world.

A little later, normal life took over. I started studying at university, got a very good job, moved to Stockholm, and had no reptiles for many years.

But one day when my wife was a little kind, she agreed to get two dabbagams for our one son. Slowly but surely she began to accept reptiles. 

After moving back to Örebro a couple of years ago and reconnecting with my best friend, I have now acquired a lot of snakes again. My friend is a Chondropython specialist and has helped me get started. Now I have double digit number of snakes and am in the process of setting up a separate room for all of them. I plan to breed ball pythons this year to produce really nice morphs. The plan is then to get emerald boas and other fun reptiles together with my friend and sons.