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In September I picked up a monitor that had his toes!!!! clipped. He is otherwise completely healthy and perfect, but I was wondering how common this is? I was personally horrified at the thought. Since then the ends of his toes have somewhat grown back, although they are pinkish instead of tan, but he has no nails on them.

I hope you're joking on this one.

I have heard of this before, toes fall off due to lack of shed or something?

It constricts the toe and causes it to fall off. Thats a bad case of an unhealthy monitor kept way too dry. Some small species will rip claws out while struggling to get away resulting in loss of toe tip. I also saw a Bosc that was raised with a nile, needless to say the woman said the nile picked on the bosc. I saw both the nile was over 4 feet and the bosc was 2 and a half feet (same age), the bosc had almost all toes missing, 3-6 inches of tail missing, and hundreds of bite scar throughout his body. The nile wasnt picking on him he was trying to eat him. I saw the nile in pics on here after the Hamburg show a few months ago.

No, unfortunately I am not joking. I suppose its possible that it had something to do with shedding, but I doubt it. He's never had any shedding problems with me, not even around the regrown portion of his toes. It seemed to me that they had been uniformly clipped off due to the precision in where the toes ended. But like I said, the good news is that he is otherwise a happy and healthy monitor and is growing like a fiend.

With the way some people are, I wouldn't really be surprised if someone was trying to 'declaw' him like they would have done to a cat.
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-audri
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