Training & Behavior

The bearded dragon is named Colonel, a sandy orange lizard with a beard he puffs when annoyed and a habit that has made him the most waved-at reptile in the county. He waves. Not at me, mostly. At strangers. Anyone who walks past his tank and pauses gets the arm, slowly lifted, slowly circled, slowly lowered, the classic dragon wave, performed with the solemnity of a monarch acknowledging a subject.

Biologists will tell you the wave is a submission signal, a young dragon calming a bigger one, a peace gesture in a language of scales. Colonel is an only dragon. There is no bigger dragon. And yet he waves at the postman, at the neighbor's child, at the delivery driver who lingers by the glass, as if he has decided that all humans are giants to be appeased, which is either instinct or a philosophy and I lean philosophy given how deliberately he does it.

I did not train this. I could not have. The first time he did it I thought he was shaking off a cramp. Then he did it again at a visitor, held the wave a beat longer, and the visitor waved back, and Colonel lowered his arm with what can only be described as satisfaction. He had started a conversation he was not equipped to finish, and the humans kept finishing it for him, which is the most human thing about the whole arrangement.

What I have shaped is the response, not the wave. When he waves, I approach, and if his beard is flat and his body is calm, I offer a stroke on the head he tolerates like a king tolerating a servant. The wave has become our handshake, his opening move, and I have built the routine around it so that a strange lizard gesture now means come say hello in a house where most pets would run.

People ask if it means he is happy. I do not know that he has a word for happy. I know the wave comes with a flat beard and bright eyes and a stillness that reads as content, and that he does it more when the room is calm and less when the dog is barking, which tells me it is a social signal tuned to the company, not a random twitch. Colonel is reading the room, in his slow cold way, and deciding each visitor is worth the gesture.

I have no explanation that satisfies the biologists, and neither does Colonel, who has stopped caring what we think and gone back to the window to wait for the next stranger to wave at. Some animal behaviors are just invitations, and the kindest thing you can do with an invitation is answer it, even if the inviter is a lizard who thinks he runs the place.

Colonel also waves at his own reflection on bright mornings, which settles the question of whether he knows it is a mirror. He does not. He waves at the dragon he thinks is behind the glass, a rival or a friend, and the wave is his whole diplomatic corps, dispatched to a foe he cannot reach and will not stop greeting. I have taken to waving back, because the alternative is to leave a lizard alone with a stranger he has politely welcomed, and that feels ruder than humoring him.

The dog, for her part, finds the whole thing beneath her, and when Colonel waves at her through the tank she sniffs once and walks off, which he reads as a slight and answers with a longer, slower wave, as if doubling down on the courtesy of a creature who will not return it. Their relationship is a one-sided diplomacy conducted across glass, and I have learned more about manners from watching it than from most of the etiquette I was taught, because Colonel never stops being polite even when the other party clearly is not.

Colonel's diet is the boring truth behind the drama. He waves, but he lives for the bowl: the greens, the dusted insects, the occasional bit of fruit I withhold like a treat he has not earned. The wave gets the visitors. The food gets him moving. And the two have fused in his small reptile brain into a routine where a stranger at the glass means a chance at attention, which means a wave, which means I come over, which means the day has gone according to plan, and I have stopped wondering if the wave is submission or greeting and started seeing it as the only social tool he has, deployed with the efficiency of a creature that knows exactly one trick and uses it on everyone.

The vet, when she saw the wave, laughed and said she had a client whose dragon did the same and had trained the whole family to wave back on sight, a household of humans performing for a lizard without a hint of shame. Colonel has done that to us. Guests who arrive skeptical leave waving at a ten-inch reptile like they have joined a cult, and the cult, I have decided, is harmless, friendly, and run by a sandy animal who thinks he is in charge, which, measured by results, he rather is. Some behaviors need no explanation. They only need an answer, and the answer, in our house, is a wave.