At first when I got my Savannah monitor, he was nothing more than skin and bones and would only eat crickets. I provided him with a really hot basking spot of about 130-150 degree with the rest of the cage being kept at room temperature and he slowly recovered from a brink of starvation. It seemed in the beginning he hadn't had much to eat before he came to live with and when I offered him lots of food, he became sick, didn't eat for over a week and threw up his food. I took him to the vet and she said his digestive system had shut down and he literally didn't have enough digestive juice to digest all that food so he apparently became sick from too much food. The vet suggested to keep the ambient air temperature at about 80-85 degree with a really hot basking spot. She also gave it some fluid and did some fecal test and administer some shots to get rid of parasites. After he slowly recovered from becoming sick because I offered him too much food, I began to feed him smaller meal everyday. I offered him a pinky mouse everyday. At first he didn't know what to make of the pinkies....he had never been offered one before, but after much persistance, he took it. I did this for over a week and then I offer two pinkies a time, but he threw it back up...so I only gave him one pinky everyday again. About 3 weeks later he seems to be improving and gaining some weight, so I offer fuzzy mice instead. This time he ate it without throwing up, so then I offered him 3 or 4 fuzzies and he ate it without throwing up. I kept doing this everyday and he grew and got fatter. Now a year later he is guzzling down mice like crazy and never look at crickets as being food. My vet told me he may be getting too big for crickets. He sure came a long way from being that scrawny monitor I bought from a pet shop. Strange thing is...the petstore I bought him from used to be a really good petstore--one of the best. They would put their reptiles in large enclosure inside a well heated cage...and their reptiles were well fed. Now they downgrade and keep their reptiles in small 20 gallon cage and sell starving animals. I don't know what happened...they used to be really good.

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• My Savannah Monitor Refuse to Eat Cricke - Paradon, Wed Dec 19 13:03:39 2007
• RE: My Savannah Monitor Refuse to Eat Cricke - holygouda, Wed Dec 19 14:39:15 2007
• RE: My Savannah Monitor Refuse to Eat Cricke - Paradon, Wed Dec 19 15:12:25 2007
• RE: My Savannah Monitor Refuse to Eat Cricke - HappyHillbilly, Thu Dec 20 08:10:07 2007