Your cage is designed for you and only you. Its not designed for the Savs at all. Its dimenisons are human and all human. We only look at ground level up.



We do understand there are animals like gophers that live from ground level down, but we don't like that. Or ants, remember those old ant farms, do they still have those, they were from ground level down, with only a tiny bit of sky.



Well Savs live from ground level down, most of their life is in the ground. They spend the vast majority of their lifes IN the ground, yet your cage is 90% or more, AIR.



A typical day for a natural sav would start in their burrow(and end there too) if the night was cool and dropped the monitors body temps to low, the monitor would stick his nose out of the burrow and warm up his head. Then after warm blood has circulated thru its body, it may come out and bask in the open, right in front of the burrow. On 99% of the days, it would not go anywhere. It was wait by its burrow for something to come by, and bang, have dinner. But after days of no food, it would go to places that it was successful before in finding food. But would not leave until it reached full operating temps.



Remember, the first part of the burrow is very warm from the sun, so the monitor does not actually have to come out to warm up, only on cold nights.



What I trying to do is give you a picture of what they are designed to do. Then compared it to your cage.



Your lites are at the top. That is very bad, for many reasons, one its at total waste of electricty. And expensive. I could heat six cages with the lites you heat one.(my cages would work too.)



The lites on the top also FORCE the monitor to climb up to the top while its body temps are too low. Some individuals are to shy to do this, which means some bold individuals will.



The shy ones will eventually fail. This is a case of offering temps, but not in a way the animals "like" "understand behaviorally" use it. Its against their nature.



Also as RSG said, not enough dirt. Think of it this way, your Savs usable life zone is both above and below the surface of the dirt. THe surface of the dirt is the middle of the life zone, not the bottom. Just some thoughts Cheers

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