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I recently bought an Aregentine black and white tegu that is 5-6 weeks old. I have read stories about people who own tegus and have trained them to go the bathroom in a certain place and even walk by their sides. I want to be able to do the same with mine but I don't know how to go about it. If anyone knows how I should go about doing this please reply. Thanks!

my tegus all go outside for a few hours a day and they all trained themselves pretty quickly to hold it till they go out. As far as any other training, tegus are very intelligent, so my advice would be to get a clicker, read up on clicker training and go for it.

ok great, thanks!

Tegus can easily be clicker trained. I far as I know I was the first one out there clicker training tegus so I have some experience with it.

To start off with, just pick up a dog training clicker at any local petshop. Then every time you click the clicker a few times quickly in a row whenever you take your tegu out to feed it or when you are giving it a snack. It doesn't take long for the tegu to learn that "click-click, click-click, click-click" means 'food'. Once you have done this you tegu will start to respond by coming to you when you click. This in itself is a great and handy thing.

Never click just to show friends, never click and fail to give a reward. If you do the clicker training will be useless and your tegu will be hard to re-clicker train.

Once the tegu is clicker trained you can start teaching your tegu to come to you and rewarding it.

Once it will come every time you click you can start saying it's name in the same manner you would call a dog. It will then associate it's name with the clicker, which is associates with food and snacks. Keep in mind, tegus are a bit more like cats then dogs in the sense that when a tegu learns it's name, that doesn't mean it will come to you like a dog would. Generally when you say the name the tegu will look back at you (it knows its name) but it may or may not come to you, more like a cat. (but they will come running when you click which leads me to think its because they end up hearing their name and not always getting treats.. smart animals)

From here I'd suggest harness training inside. Get the tegu used to the harness. It will drag it around and try to back out of it, but just let it try and only get involved if you can see the tegu getting really tangled or stressed. Also, do not let the tegu get free from the harness while it's on the floor or it will 'learn' that it can get out and will keep trying. This training is not only to let your tegu get used to the harness, but also to make sure the tegu can't slip out of it. You'd hate to get outside with the harness on the tegu for the first time and find out the tegu could get out.

When walking the tegu around, click to make the tegu come to you and speak "Heel" and give it a treat. Do this over and over until heel makes the tegu come. Keep in mind, unless you always have a treat a tegu doesn't always heel. When I free roam my tegus at the local parks I just let them walk and I heel (stay with them)

Litterbox training is done by using the tegus natural tendencies to train them. A tegu will 'go' when in warm water. Every time you take the tegu out, put it in warm water for 5 to 10 minutes and as soon as it 'goes' click once, take it out of the water and give it a treat while reinforcing words such as "good" or "good boy".

This is not intended to be a complete training manual, but just some ideas on the direction I have used since I started the whole clicker training thing. I hope it helps you..

For a little history on how I came to start clicker training see this link. Look about halfway down the post.

Rick
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The Tegu Community - theTegu.com

Hey thanks a lot, I really really appreciate the information. I will start clicker training right away!

how do you reward them without losing fingers??? Rufus is sooo impatient. Even with long tweezers(foot long plus) I count my fingers sometimes just to make sure. Will a pat on the head or scratch his neck work?

Mike B

First, I avoid feeding live rodents for meals. I also feed my tegus seperate from the other tegus and on the floor in the livingroom, from a plate. This helps remove the high feeding response.

For snacks some superworms or even strawberries or grapes make a good treat. When the tegu responds to your clicking it will come to you. When it does, sit on hand on it's fron shoulders so it can't push forward, then sit the snack down in the tegus site (so he know you gave it to him) then let the tegu go.

For more info on clicker training click my link below.

Rick
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The Tegu Community - theTegu.com

It's 3:30am and I didn't realize how tired I was until I saw all my typos in that last post.

Rick
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The Tegu Community - theTegu.com