Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I was reading some of the older posts about taming rhino iguanas and there seems to be a general consensus that having a free roaming iguna in an iguana proofed room will speed up the process or at least make it less painful. My question is regarding feces. How do you manage that?

With my bearded dragons, they usually poop once a day, and once they do, I let them out to roam my room. But their poop is still big and smelly. The nice thing is the urates is expelled at the same time, so there's no actual liquid urine.

If I do indeed get an iguana and eventually let it roam, will I just have feces everywhere, or is there a secret I'm just missing?

Thanks for any answers you guys can give me!

Hi, in my limited experience it depends on the iguana. Some of them seem to potty train and some don't. I am dealing with one that wants to poop everywhere as we speak. She won't seem to pick one spot.

My male green has historically picked a spot and stuck with it for long periods before changing it. This makes it easy to put down newspaper or paper towels.

Pete the Caymanensis always gets down on the floor and seems to sort of aim for the papers except when he is pissed off. When we lock him in here for the day he tends to poop off the papers. I suspect he knows precisely what he is doing.

On a good note, if you feed them some rep-cal pellets as a supplement to greens and things it tends to firm it up so that it is easy to pick up and doesnt get spread all over.

Not sure if this helps you at all.

Carole
www.reptilecare.com

Reptilecare

is to try and tub train the lizard. This takes time and patience but can be done. You need to be consistant. Adult iguanas usually will only defecate once daily. At the same time every day, preferably in the morning, give the lizard a warm bath. Most iguanas will do their business in the bath. When he's done take him back to his room. When he is sufficiently trained to the tub try to poo him in a pan of water in his room. I use cat litter pans with about 1.5 inches of water in them and they are very easy to clean. Good luck!

I'm not as seasoned at indoor living as your previous 2 repliers, but my group(2.4 recently scaled back from 4.5), live in the loft of a 672sqft. garage. I scaled back because the males would not get along, and the smallest female was not getting the attention she required. I have a partition with 175sqft for the two smallest, each about 9lbs. The big ones 12lbs+ have about 400sqft. The floor was first layed with linoleum, then cardboard and/or rosen paper, and in select areas, newspaper over that. So far their seems to be no rhym or reason to where they poop. For furniture I have primarily bales of hay and alfalfa. The larger ones don't use their hide box areas, which consist of bales of alfafa wedged against the slant of the roof. The younger ones still prefer the security. They have been in this set up for about 4 months -- previously outdoors. There are still alot of areas for improvements. I will put up some pictures when the habitat becomes more creditable.