A snake, a lizard or a tortoise cannot tell you it is cold, and by the time it shows you, the damage is often done. The RSPCA puts it in one sentence: exotic pets "have the same needs as they would in the wild. This means that caring for them properly can be difficult." This section is the numbers behind those needs, taken from the bodies that publish them, with the disagreements left in.
The RSPCA's advice for bringing a reptile home is short and worth following to the letter. Have the enclosure running before you collect the animal, with the temperatures "constantly maintained for at least three days" first. Carry it home warm, in a ventilated container, and put the container into the enclosure and let the animal come out in its own time. Then, for a snake, "turn off the room lights and close the door" and leave it until the next morning, and for a lizard or tortoise likewise leave it until the following day. Do not handle it unnecessarily for the first week. If there are other reptiles in the house, the newcomer finishes a 90-day quarantine before it meets them, and you register with a vet who sees reptiles before you need one.
Hiding is not sulking. Finding somewhere to hide is natural behavior for a reptile, the RSPCA says, and its rule is one hide in the warm end and one in the cool end, each big enough for the whole animal, opaque, heavy enough not to move, and easy to clean. Many species also want a humid hide, a box of damp moss, which is what gets a snake or gecko through a shed in one piece. Water goes in "a large, shallow dish" in the cool end, changed at least once a day and at once if the animal fouls it, and for a snake or tortoise the dish has to be big enough to bathe in. Some species, chameleons above all, never learn to drink from a dish and need droplets from a spray or a dripper.
Reptiles carry Salmonella on healthy skin, and in the United States the FDA has banned the sale of turtles with shells under 4 inches since 1975 because small children put them in their mouths. The ban is still needed: in August 2026 the CDC was investigating an outbreak from small turtles in which "all of the sick people" were children under 10, and in 2024 it counted 51 illnesses across 21 states with almost half of them hospitalized. The CDC's rules are the ones to keep: wash hands with soap right after touching the animal or anything in its enclosure, no kissing it and no eating around it, clean its equipment outside or in a utility sink rather than the kitchen, and no reptiles in homes with children under five, adults over 65, or anyone with a weakened immune system.
The RSPCA's page of concerns about exotic pets is the honest counterweight to the shop. It objects to wild-caught animals in the trade, notes that impulse buyers "haven't done their homework about the reality of what they're taking on", and reports that exotic pets end up in its care "once the novelty wears off". The care guides above say the same thing animal by animal, including the price of the enclosure against the price of the animal, and the setup tool shows what the enclosure has to do before the animal goes in it.