Thank you Frank!

Hahahahaha! Are you saying all my tristis are MALE cause they like me?

Point well taken. I understand and absolutely agree. Though you must admit, the relationships a monitor forms are very subtle in appearance compared to the relationships humans understand so well. That’s where the enormous hole in my experience and husbandry is, my limited knowledge of monitors relationships with other monitors. But not because I haven’t tried! I am sorry I didn’t find Scooter someone (another monitor) he could get along with, unfortunately, my choices were not his choices. I totally screwed up in the beginning with the set of tristis I have. I wonder a lot if that is directly related to the fact that they all act pretty genderless. (probably ) I decided against buying any more monitors at all until I have an enclosure ready I can really be proud of. Boy do I have big plans. I want more mangroves someday....*sigh* Unfortunately, not in the foreseeable future, but hopefully someday. My husbandry skills get us by, but holy cow I am STILL learning! I wish I had the capability to give them more. I am confident now that I know how to achieve the best environment I can provide thanks in HUGE part to you, even though I have been stung by your monitorish attitude a few times myself(ya beast!). I didn’t always like it, however, I learned so much from the things you have said. There are about a dozen others who have come and gone from this forum that I owe a debt of gratitude for valuable information, but none like you. *hug* (don’t bite me! lol!)

Ya hear me out there monitor peeps!?!
You too can learn so much from Frank if you pay attention. It’s actually easier now than it’s ever been, his spelling and grammar are soooooo much better than when I first met him! I used to wonder if he might actually BE a monitor trying to type on the keyboard! Sometimes it was difficult to tell when I was being insulted…lol. SO PLEASE... Stop wasting his time with questions you can answer yourself or questions and comments that don’t matter here. If you want to post, contribute pictures and stories of your monitors if you are still learning and shouldn’t be answering questions.

K Frank. No more typing. That contribution was enough to last a few months right? See you!
-H-

NEWBIES!
P.S. And now since I don’t seem to have an aversion to obscenely long posts...
I was impressed with this post’s content. It was lost in a ridiculous thread about manners. Peeps, read this post by Frank again. This isn’t a guy with a few lizards in his house. His successes span many many generations of babies he has hatched and grown to adults, and literally THOUSANDS of monitors he has kept, not to mention traveling the globe and observing all aspects of wild monitors living their lives. Read it and understand it.

Written by FR - I have lots of monitors, they are not un-tame, they are not mean, they do not want to bite you. You really have to offend them to make them aggressive. Mine will follow me around beg for food, want to be around me, just for something to do.

The point is, you must allow your monitor health and metabolism before you consider it’s tame or not. You must allow it to be a monitor first.

Any monitor at half its metabolism is tame. Their tame, because they cannot move right. They can only move slow. A healthy monitor has tremendous speed, they can outrun you without problem. They can react at incredible speed, they can catch birds in flight, or catch a jumping cricket in mid air.

Also, a tame monitor is curious, if they are awake, they have to investigate, so they squirm around if you try to hold them. To sit there to me means something’s wrong with the monitor. As that is not what a healthy monitor does. If you pick one up, they normally lift their head high to see what’s going on, they then see something of interest and HAVE to investigate it. That’s what a monitor is. Kinda like a ferret. They cannot seem to keep out of anything.

So one sitting there while you pet its ear is odd. Something is wrong with it. It’s gone submissive, and monitors are not submissive. They are curious intelligent "ACTIVE" creatures. In addition, they have minds of their own.

So please before you go on being mister tamer person, allow the monitor to be a monitor. The cool part, they are not mean to start with. (disclaimer) a percentage of wild caughts have been tortured beyond belief. They indeed have suitable reason to be mean and hate people.

About taming, I have wild roadrunners and wild lizards that eat out of my hands and crawl up on my lap, they follow me all over. They even just sit with me while I am working on our trucks And they are wild. They have no problem doing that voluntarily, but they do not like to be grabbed. Cheers

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