Hello!

I was wondering about some unusual monitor behavior.

I've got Stig, a 4.5 year old male black throat. He has been easy-going and handleable for a few years now. His diet is primarily raw turkey meatballs fortified with bone meal, other lean raw meats, and occasionally boiled chicken eggs.

Today the local reptile shop had a huge batch of fresh quail eggs from a farm, so I picked up a few dozen to see if he would like them.

Stig has never had raw eggs of any type before.

He happily tried the raw quail eggs. He would chomp the egg rather than swallowing it, sending egg slime all over and not actually eat any of the egg. After about 10 chomped eggs (none of them actually consumed) I removed the bowl to hard boil the survivors. Stig proceeded to rub his face in the egg slime and lick egg mud.

When I returned about 15 minutes later with the cooked eggs, he reacted *very* aggressively, hissing, puffing, and tail whipping. He has not done this in years, and has never reacted this way to food removal in the past. He chomped each hard boiled egg, shook it dog-style, and tossed it aside when it did not crack into egg slime.

He behaved aggressively for about 20 minutes and destroyed (but did not eat) a lot of eggs. After a bath to get all the crud off of him, he was back to his mellow ways.

Is this normal behavior during a raw egg dinner?

Are raw eggs some sort lizardy crack?

Has anyone observed their monitor "playing" with their food?

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