I wouldn’t have expected you to give response to this post, as I don’t think it really detracts from your approach. Similarly, it’s not trying to impress any thought upon you that you don’t likely already have or disagree with. Once again, you’re taking me in the wrong tone. Unfortunately, I can’t always render enough tone for clarity in type font.

The point of that post was to stimulate more actively independent thought in many of the people who don’t keep quite so many animals or experience full cycle success with their inkeeps. As you put it, food for thought. It was a discussion of physiological and behavioral generalities as they relate to captive maintenance and how understanding such principles can help avoid at least some shot gunning. In other words, a breakdown of less accessible principles that can and do make the difference in husbandry. Whether each reader (who actually had the patience to get through it) took anything from the post or not is up to his/her discretion, although I did manage to steal a good bit of time from those who took nothing, hahaha.

You seem to interpret my words as implying that single species captive diets are preferable rather than practical. They are often preferable because of being practical. As I mentioned in a post to mrcota, consistently varied prey items do influence the animals, mostly beyond metabolism (the two of you discussed that briefly, too). Feed a lizard or bunny to a monitor that normally gets mice, and you might get a more vicious feeding response. That’s a different natural behavior. Not a better one, just different. Metabolism might speed up very temporarily on behalf of such behavior. That may seem preferable to some keepers, to do that all the time (instead of on occasion, which is not that much different than never at all). However, as I would assume you understand, it’s usually not practical. Impractical for keepers are many, many food items (more different kinds of prey than can most readily be procured). Conversely, impractical in the wild would be to rely on a single prey species. Both ends of the spectrum work in their applied fields; no attempt at shock value there. It is only the time and financial practicality of single species diets in captivity that can make them preferable as well.

True, it is always a good idea for beginners to have something concrete (or nearly so) with which to work, but you can’t offer that in all areas. What’s the best nesting substrate for rudicollis? There isn’t a concrete answer for that one (is there?). As you already mentioned, you yourself encouraged the person that bred them (with repetition) up north to figure it out from the animals. I was expounding on a starting point for such specimen-reading. Many care guides and papers and books encourage keepers to go with certain allegedly species-specific details (hence the squirrel nest joke), which are usually incomplete or inapplicable to the species as a whole, but rarely exposed as such in the respective titles. By giving explanations on more basic principles (not theories) as they apply to squamate physiology and resultant behavior, perhaps readers will be better able to weigh such publications and in turn gain ideas of their own. Then again, the average attention span likely precludes reading a post so long as the one above to try to get what the point is, rather than shooting straight for the short mandatory basking temps chapter.

You ring the bell of simple results. That (surprisingly) often proves ineffective news here in a way, as it’s not enough for many people’s detail appetite. Some want dramatic news. They want details, but seemingly, not the kind (basic principles rather than theory/concrete specifics) I write about (the explanatory half of the equation, opposite of results, as you put it). The species-specific details that are often not fully worked out (or not consistent enough to ever be fully worked out) seem to be the ones commonly sought out for application on captives. That approach is preferable to many, but has proven practical for few. Neither of our discussion styles will likely guide everyone away from this ineffective mode of thinking (you offer the simple that comes with a pretty picture, yet not everyone clings to your cufflinks; I submit too many hard words and the drawn out reasoning for the simplicity, and I doubt anyone would cling to those cufflinks even if I wore them). I don’t really care, since as I already said, success is determined by the perceptiveness of the individual keepers. The posts that try to stimulate principle-based approaches (rather than with theories) often go least noticed. Oh well.

[ Show Entire Thread ]