It is 11am at Doncaster racecourse and I am standing next to a table containing over 30 pythons squeezed into a tiny, plastic box - just a fraction of their size.
On a nearby stall sit dozens of small containers full of colourful leopard geckos, while two iguanas on sale for £1,250 each are in an enclosure - thousands of miles away from their natural habitat of the humid and tropical forests of Central and South America.
I’d early queued in the cold alongside hundreds of reptile enthusiasts, mainly men wearing black hoodies, to get inside the event organised four times a year by the International Herpetological Society, which has been held at the racecourse for the last two decades.
