Reptile & Amphibian Forums

What foods besides the obvious (candy, pizza, sweets, rotten food, all the stupid stuff) are really not good for your monitor. I generally only feed mice and some raw eggs but in the past have fed things like, cooked steak, cooked tuna, cooked chicken, raw ground beef with eggs and so on. Are any of these foods dangerous to feed? Can I feed raw meats? Thanks for any help

Excessive can cat/dog food isn't good to feed all the time. It's very rich and the monitor can easily get additcted to the great taste of it.
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Greg Holland
G&M HERPS
www.imageevent.com/gmherps
gmherps@sbcglobal.net

You can feed raw meats like chicken peices and ground turkey. And you can actually pull off feeding freshly spoiled meats to monitors providing the monitor is healthy and the temps are right. Although I wouldn't recomend it, but my friend feeds his btm freshly spoiled meats every now and then and he has not had any probs. You can even feed your monitor dead snakes providing you know the exact cause of death and it isn't a wc animal. They will eat pretty much anything, but I keep there diet at mainly rats with occasional ground turkey mixed with eggs, calcium, and insects. Sometimes I give them hard boiled eggs and even mix some fruits in(which some monitors seem to enjoy although I don't do it too often). I also give them things like crabs and fish(not feeder fish from petland!). The main things I would stay away from are very greasey foods, dog/cat food, fast food(Macdonalds, pizza, stuff like that), and I definetly wouldn't give my monitors candy.

BTW, I believe I already mentioned it, but their main diet consists of rodents. I just like to give them a varied diet so I do occasionally give them things like ground turkey mix, chicken pieces, crabs, fish, and other odds and ends.
But I would still keep rats as their main diet.

Raw meats can potentially give your monitor samonilla which could be passed on to you if bitten,so sticking to whole prey items is best. Although cooked turkey along with a few other common diets haven't proven to be unhealthy as of yet any way.
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0.0.1 Varanus Salvator (Gator)
0.1.3 Varanus Exanthematicus (Adisa "long term captive" other 3 "yet to be named hatchlings"
2.0 Ferrets (Chaos & Kasha)
1.0 Cat (George)

but why?

you can feed your monitor strips of meat, but why?

last i heard there is not a nation wide mouse shortage. as a matter of fact i just got in a bunch a couple weeks ago, so i am sure there isn't.

stick to whole foods like mice, not strips of mice but bone, hair, meat, organs, etc.

it provides a balanced diet.

andrew

Mice, rats, chickens, quail, crickets, roaches, superworms, etc etc. Those are all great foods and enough variation to keep them guessing all of the time, but simplify it to make it easy on you and your wallet. Human foods, dog foods, cat foods, hmmm what does the name suggest for humans, cats and dogs. The best food you can give to your monitor is whole animals, bones, guts, hair, fur, feathers, eyes, brains, etc etc, thats where all the vitamins and minerals, etc are contained. Your animal doesnt get bored of the food, so why try to fix something that aint broke? If you break it in the process then you do need to fix it.

?

on my opinion, they do well with rodents, it's ok to try alternative diet...but if rodents are better than other diet, why waste time and money on other stuff? just a thought...

much respect!
Neil