Reptile & Amphibian Forums

At recent reptile show someone stated that the fur on adult mice and rodents are real bad for the monitors and they have a hard time digesting them, and if i wuz going to feed mice do only pinkies? i have seen no problem from either one so far, i this true?

real bad to digest? haha well the thing is they cannot digest the fur it is used as roughage. it is not a bad thing it will help clean the pipes so to speak. It only does harm if the rest of the husbandry sucks. Then you may get impactions, or if you fed a really really really fur ball of a rodent to a smaller monitor, it might get caught up. LOL

>>At recent reptile show someone stated that the fur on adult mice and rodents are real bad for the monitors and they have a hard time digesting them, and if i wuz going to feed mice do only pinkies? i have seen no problem from either one so far, i this true?

Just an observation

If the animal is dehydrated, unable to properly digest, and also sickly obese it can add up to an animal that gets impactions from insoluable hair, feathers etc. A healthy monitor darn near digests anything it can get its mouth around and fast.

Hair, scales, feathers, are roughage, and are an important part of a reptile diet. Healthy reptiles do not have a problem passing these, in fact, its needed to maintain health.

This is true with Wild and captive reptiles.

Weak, sick, dehydration individuals can become impacted with hair, feathers, scales or exo-skeletons. This is a sign that the individual is not in proper health. These animals should be taken to a Vet. The owners should also review their husbandry to make sure the problem is not their fault.

Good luck FR

That..
1) Authors would have many pics of other peoples monitors, or pics of their own obese sickly boscs, and recently imported sickly abused skeletons of monitors.
2) Preached horrible husbandry practices
3) Surely never saw reproduction in their collections.
4)Many pics of misidentified species.
5) They wrote about impactions being caused by MOUSE HAIR, FEATHERS, etc as a normal thing in captivity. Yet these are the same people who said that a secondary infection like a respiratory infection occurs from temps being a bit too low or from too high of humidity.
My husbandry used to suck bad years ago, a I buried a few monitors over almost 13 years, yet I had to learn from my animals because the books sucked and their authors sure as heck didnt know what they were talking about.

You know Ive never seen a respiratory infection or an impaction in any monitor, yet Ive read about them and hear about them, makes me wonder how much torture it takes to get that to occur??