Reptile & Amphibian Forums

To those of you have experiance raising igs, what would you say is the general attitude, personality, and behavior of these lizards? I have read that they CAN become tame and doglike, but is this a common occurence? Will they always bite, tail-whip/hiss or is this just a by-product of not being handled? Eventually I'd like to get an iguana, but I want to make sure that a herp of that size will be tame and not bite if raised properly. Thanks and I would appreciate some feedback on this.

Well I don't know that I would say any behaviour is common. Since iguanas are wild animals they always surprise you with their attitudes/temperment. I would say in my opinion that a male in breeding season will 80% or more of the time become aggressive, this does not mean it will stay that way but it has been my general experience. We have males and females that have been handled since coming in to us and some are so tame a child could hold them others would bite or whip given any opportunity. So some of their temperment is due to how they are treated some is just because they are a wild animal. It would never be my idea of a calm pet even though we have some that are calmer than our dog just for the fact that being wild it could change at any time.

Hope I didn't ramble on and that this helps answer the question.
Stephanie

well the first thing you should know is an iguana like a person has there own temperment. there is no way to tell if they will be friendly when they are older. i dont belive in the thing where if you hold him/her for 15 min a day that they will become tamed. i think it is crap. if the iguana doesnt like people holdinh him/her for 15 isnt going to do crap. do most iguana tame down? most do and some dont. the ones that dont are ussually the ones that have been neglected and have become afraid of people. i have heard this from many people and i belive it to is a lot of the adopted iguanas tend to be calmer. i know mine was. but there are always exceptions. some just will never calm down.
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0.0.1 rescued petco iguana
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0.0.1 mali uromastyx
0.1.0 painted turtle
0.0.1 common snapping turtle

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