"Goodness Gracious Nat. He's so little.  For a dragon, I mean."

"They're only a couple weeks old," he reminded her. Though it was not an uncommon reaction. They had been eggs only a few weeks ago, still people somehow expected them to be huge. In comparison, the Hebrideans might have seemed huge, despite being close in age. "Fireballs aren't one of the bigger species. And the males are smaller than the females." Though that was harder to tell at this age. Lilu was the largest.

"Hi sweetheart.  Aren't you a precious little thing."

She spoke to the dragon, which was comforting. He had worried that giant lizards would have scared her off. Well at least scared her back to the flat. They were contractually obligated to each other now. It was harder to be scared off when there were legal documents blessing your union.

"Why Lok? Does it mean somthin?"

Why Lok? That was a strange question. Well maybe not so strange. "It's Chinese. I think it means joy." His Chinese was a little rusty. He needed to work it again. He could picture the pages of the white book at home on the second shelf of the shortest bookshelf in the living room. But actually speaking the language required some practice. He should probably get it figured if he was going to focus on their dragons. "Most of the kids will probably go back to China at a year or two, so I though they should have proper names."

He was not anxious to lose his kids to China. And he still had a year with them. "I want to do some behavior things with the clutches, but its hard to…. People just want to know what the dragons can do for them, they aren't really interested in the dragons themselves. But… they're really fascinating."

There was so much they still didn't know about dragons. There were a slue books on the subjects, he owned many of them. Three of the shelves on the second tallest bookshelf were solely about dragon. The chapters on behavior and health were minimal, the lists of things their parts could be used for were seemingly endless.

It was how most of the reserves paid their expenses, including this one. Dragon dung was plentiful. Scales and skins could be collected some when they shed. Bigger pieces were taken as were things like Hearstrings and whatever other organs they wanted were harvested when they died. Again this was mainly yearlings. Once the dragons reached adult hood, they lived for a long while. They took blood from the dragons fairly often. Most dragon blood came from the yearlings who were small enough that it didn't matter. Getting it from the larger dragons, though it would have been considered better quality, was difficult. They only did so with the very social dragons, and having mostly welsh greens, this particular reserve did not have a lot of that.

He leaned down, setting Lok on the stone floor. The girls were stumbling over each other to get out of the stall, now that Lok was on the ground. If he was out, they would be damned if they weren't at least as brave as he was. His three brothers seemed less impressed, and instead filled up the door way. "I'm trying to teach them some basic commands. I mean not these guys. They're only two weeks, but the others. You know muggle zoos do all sorts of behavior training with exotics. If a rhino or giraffe can learn to target and present body parts for keepers to inspect, these guys can do it." He was very certain that his dragons were far more intelligent than a giraffe. He was not sure how that had evolved, but giraffes were just ridiculous.