I took my lot of lizards to my little brothers very CATHOLIC primary school. They asked where the boyfriends of all the other females were - the teachers weren't very happy when I explained that one male took care of all the ladies, but they were cheered up when they heard about the shinglebacks' cross-country trek to find their mate. I made them pinky-swear that they wouldn't touch anything that they found in the wild and they all turned to the person next to them and shook pinkies... It made me laugh.
A kid in year 4 told me that I was stupid to have them out because if they touched the spikes they would die.
My elderly neighbour swore to me black-and-blue that her mother was a nurse at a school and "once a kid was bitten by a blue tongue and it swelled up and got pussy and then, every year on the same day, it went like that again and she had to give him antibiotics."
An Indian who recently moved here tried to smack my dragon out of my hands to kill it. He also squished a a frog because it was in his house. I asked him why he didn't just take it outside and he said "WHAT?! WITH MY HANDS?!?!?!?!". He was under the impression that the wet stuff on their skin was, in fact, poison and would soak through your skin and kill you. I couldn't convince him otherwise.
But then there are always the sweeties who, at the start of a talk, are terrified of the animals, and by the end, when they get to have a pat, they're the ones who stay behind after the bell rings. And the ones where a mother was going to buy her daughter a cat, but after meeting your lizards, decides that she'll buy her one of those instead.
Oh, and my own MOTHER telling me that she had a friend who was feeding the sheep and he saw a snake and it chased him all the way back to his ute and the climbed the wheel because "it hated him!" 0.0
I also get asked if the Shinglebacks have a brain in each head or only a brain in one of them. "How do you tell which end is the head?"
"Why pay that much for a bloody lizard?! I could go get you dozens of the little blighters!"
"Why do you BUY all those crickets? Can't you just catch them?" this coming from a 40year old school teacher, which is odd... How many crickets do they think the little guys eat?! I'm not spending my day catching 250 odd crickets everyday, not to mention the poisons.