Trailer bulges with exotic stars  
Canadian Press - Monday, July 6, 1998

        Pull back the shower curtain in Dean Harper's mobile home and there's an alligator soaking in the bathtub.  Enter his living room, and Harper cautions visitors to "excuse the dip in the couch - a Siberian tiger we  babysat last year took a a chunk out of the stuffing."

        It turns out that every room in Harper's modest trailer 90 kilometers north of Calgary, contains a menagerie of exotic animals - geckos, bull frogs, red-footed tortoises, even a 3.8 meter long Burmese python named "Thing".  Yet the 27-year-old founder of the educational touring show, Wrappin About Reptiles, sees nothing alarming about his caged roomates.

        In fact, Harper contends his most aggresive pet isn't "Thing", or a Boa constrictor named "Buddy", but his free roaming house cat, "Baghera".  "The cat is very unpredictable," he warns. All the same, Harper scoops up little "Baghera" and deposites him safely behind closed doors when "Al" the alligator is let loose for a photo opportunity.  "Al", who is on loan to Harper from a friend in British Columbia, is getting a lot of attention these days.  The 1.3 meter long American alligator is among the many reptiles that the olds animal breeder is providing for a Disney film being shot in Calgary.  Noah's Ark, starring Tony Danza of Who's the Boss and Taxi fame, is based on the epic biblical story of the Flood.  It features a re-creation of the ark that supposedly saved breeding pairs of each species on Earth.

        Many of the creatures shown slithering or crawling up the ark's gangplank are part of Harper's reptile show, which has toured schools and malls around Alberta for the past 2 1/2 years.

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