Sorry about the delay. I had to make a trip to the National Zoo today, having promised to help acquire reptile care products for them. Here there is a severe shortage of UVB lighting, reptile vitamins and other reptile care products, i.e. medications specifically for reptiles and topical solutions.



Keeping in mind your success with Varanids, I will equate it with the multi-million dollar (probably billions of dollars over the years?) business of alligator and crocodile farming. They have 50 years of success worldwide with untold numbers of generations and offspring. Most (not all) farms around the world do this with chicken, only chicken and not even always whole chicken. I am sure that you would not recommend this diet with its calcium deficiency in comparison to mammals or turtles. They do not feed whole chickens in many programs. Success in this case is not only well documented, but out performs all other captive reptile breeding programs combined. Good diet? You can definitely make a case there for variety, but they are in it for business, not the welfare of the animals. Crocodiles are not Varanids, but they are both predators that feed on basically anything that they come across, including rotten carrion, but they both have nutritional needs.



Captive snakes: I have a Cylindrophis ruffus that should eat rodents (mice), but for some unknown reason will not eat any of its known prey items and is prey specific, eating only a single species of eel, Monopterus albus. I will agree that rodents are the diet of choice for most Boids; however, monitors are not Boids. Although snakes and monitors have similar digestive systems, to a certain degree, and both seem to have the ability to extract more out of their prey in the digestive process than most other reptiles, no snake has the ability to take on the variety of food that most monitors can handle (try feeding a snake canned food or rotten carrion). The only snakes that I have seen eating bits and pieces of different animals (chicken bones for example) and even trash (items that I feel would not be appropriate for this forum) was Boiga irregularis while I was in Guam and that was purely out of the need of survival, having eradicated all other prey species.



I like your idea of mental stimulation! Why did I not think of that? I also agree to that aspect. Monitors being the highly intelligent creatures they are, by reptile standards, can only benefit from mental stimulation, as long as that stimulation is not stress related.



Knowing that I can not convince you, no matter what, I have at least been mentally stimulated by our exchange and even we Homo sapiens need mental stimulation from time to time.



Thank you for the mental stimulation as well as exercising my mind by pulling out information that had been long forming cobwebs- the curse of storing information in the mind that is too often superfluous.



Cheers,



Michael

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