How I interact with my captives depends solely on the individual animals themselves. Having raised and kept various species, I can attest to the fact that there is no majic recipe for "tamimg" monitors. My animals know the difference between a mouse and my hands regaurdless of how they smell. They are quite intelligent. I spend a fair amount of time feeding the monitors here and am sure I probably smell like a gourmet lizard buffet by the time I get to feeding my very large niles. Funny thing is, as soon as they smell food the next cue is the sight of the food item I happen to feeding at the time. I can show them an empty hand and they will continue looking for what they know to be actual food.



I know for certain that the hand over hand "treadmill" method pictured in the video never worked for any of my animals. In fact it had the opposite effect. When I used the daily "gentle" handling method, I never saw anything but signs of activity in the cages. The monitors themselves hid when they knew humans were around. It was not untill I began using food to reverse their instinctive fear of humans that I had any measure of success at getting them comfortable with human presence.

[ Show Entire Thread ]