I have no experiece with veiled chameleons first hand, but I have heard from everyone that they're more high strung. Not like they're really agressive, but they just don't care to be anywhere around people. My gf has two panthers though and they are both super sweet. About half the time I open their cages they'll slowly walk out, and once they're out they'll easily climb on your hand and just hang out with you. They never gape or hiss at us (unless we're trying to pull them out or our hand is deep in the cage), but they're super paranoid about our dogs. We have the reptibreeze cages since free ranging with dogs isn't too good of an idea (at least with our dogs). From how they behave I think it'd be hard to free range them anyway, they'd constantly climb down and wander off.

I used to think they were a pain in the ass to take care of, but once we got a mist system they're super simple. So now every week I top off the bucket for the mist system, my gf cleans the bottom of their cage about every week, we feed them once a day in the morning, and that's really it. We do live in Florida though so it's easy to keep humidity up when it's like 40% in the house all year. I don't know if veileds are different for dusting, but we only dust with multi vitamins and calicium WITH d3 once or twice a month (gf manages that, but it's certainly not a 3 day cycle with us). The biggest pain with chameleons is buying the mist system and maintaining feeders. Crickets are just so nasty to me, the poop and the smell is just terrible. Plus I try to micromanage everything too much sometimes so I'm worried about gutloading the crickets as well as possible and rotating veggies.

I'd reccommend going for a male though, I think in all chameleon types they live longer than females and plenty of species need an egg laying tub for the girls. Ours layed her first clutch right about a year old so now that egg laying tub is a permanent fixture in her cage. We could tell she had eggs but it still wasn't painfully obvious since it wasn't a HUGE clutch. Plus the females in a lot of species don't really look special. In panther chameleons all females are like a pink color, the boys are all different. Nosy be/faly are usually blue, ambanja are blue/green, abilobe has a lot of red and sometimes yellow, etc.

I love my snakes but I can't deny that there's something really cool about chameleons though. I guess because ours are so personable on top of the fact that chameleons are just amazing to watch eat.