at 3:00 am, LOTS of things sound good!



"forest mix" i am not necessarily familiar with. is it a garden store bought mulch? are you referring to Forest Floor by Zoo Med? that is a cypress product.



we have used Cypress Mulch for years and years, i like it a lot. we have used it for monitors, Gilas, boas, pythons, colubrids, just about every animal we have ever had at one time or another.



we still use it for snakes, but for breeder monitors, Gilas, and lizards, no more.



it is an okay product for lizards. and if you don't know any better, it is even "really nice". but once we started using a soil, for lizards, there was absolutely no turning back. the difference is night and day.



if a good diggable soil is 100% of what you want for your animal, the end all to be all "ultimate", i would say cypress is somewhere around 70%, maybe less. the funny thing is, a bad dirt, like straight topsoil or crappy potting soil, is even worse



seeing how much the animals enjoy the soil, seeing how they make use of it and REALLY thrive (and we thought they were thriving before!), you just can't go back to a cypress setup and feel good about it in your head or heart.



for example...



we have kept Gilas on soil for well over a year now (basic monitor, Gila, Uro setup). they love it. SOOOOO much better. but we had too many males. so i had to sell some of our surplus adult males. i really struggled with that because I KNEW that they were going back to a substandard setup, a cool cage with crappy temperatures, newspaper, aspen, or cypress substrate, and just overall misdirected care. it isn't really the new keeper's fault, it is just ignorance of the possibilities.



the point is that i hated to send them off to a home that was going to be so much less appropriate for them, it really broke my heart.



i couldn't imagine at this point trying to set up monitors on cypress for the long term, because i have seen what is possible with soil, and how much happier the animals have been.



so using "forest mix", probably not a good idea. especially for the Uros, as it doesn't really accomplish much for them, doesn't serve any "tool" purpose for them, ya know?
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robyn@proexotics.com



Pro Exotics Reptiles

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