i got my timor at the same time as my black rough neck , it was about half adult size , what I did notice is this , since it had some areas on the one front leg and one on the body that looked like a swelling , this was only noticed the day after i got it since it was not about to stand still and pose just being brought home , I picked it up without much trouble and it did not attempt to bite , the swelling was soft so I looked in a book on parasites that i had and called a few vets , what i ended up doing was clean the areas with betadine and used a steril safelt pin on an angle just to break the skin and produce a small opening and used the tweezers to gently work around the area to force whatever was in there out , it seemed to be just under the skin as described in a book as a misguided tapeworm , what did come out was white and very easy to break so i worked slowly and managed to remove four 3to4"long white soft worms that were alive and not segmented like a tapeworm , i did locate a few more after and did the same ,i never did find out just what they were but once in the open they did dry up very rapidly , the point to this is the more I handled the timor the more calm it became and got to the point of just relaxing , now since then I have not handled it very often and the cage is large enough that i do not have to remove the timor to do so , but once i did pick it up i was bitten and torn to shreads , these litlle guys do have alot more strength than one would expect so if it is a calm timor you want than working with it a little ata time seems to work well , of course all monitors have a different temporment and some will never calm down , so far the monitor i have found to be the calmest of all is the dumeral by far , they may hiss and swat but most times will not attempt to bite , again there are exceptions , I have had two timors and both when handled at cage cleaning time remained calm which was a twice a week deal . Some people have one monitor and work with it and their goal is to have one that is calm and tame , others have more than one and this is not their object of desire , my dumeral can always be trusted if i need to handle him the others are maybe maybe not , it depends , I can't say if it is stressful for them to be tamed , they may learn to loose fear and trust you but I don't think any monitor enjoys being handled much , this is just my opinion . I have had niles and salvador's and black throats ,savannah's and mangroves , a mangrove will calm and is one of my favorite monitors , i had a male that i got full grown that i kept for 3 years and it passed away a few months ago and i still miss him . I now stay away from large monitors , not that i don't like them but the room required to house them and keep them happy , all the monitors I have of did have were petshop rescues , I lost 2 baby niles that were almost lifeless , pulled a few out of this condition , lost a female mangrove that was only 2 feet total lenth to egg binding and a vet that did not know what he was doing and told me it was MBD because the rear legs were immoble , even though I insisted they were fine the day before so now I have an x-ray to show for that and my male mangrove from some sort of slow loss of movement of the front legs that came on suddenly and progressed to death , the vet could never tell me what the problem was , the conclusion was from a spider bite to nerve damage and blood tests confirmed nothing , it was also said it could have been old age . Timors are great little monitors and now that I have a black tree monitor there is no monitor I would rather have , once established they are one of the most interesting to watch and keep that I have seen so far .
