Quote:
Originally Posted by Grim
I caught a savannah monitor near a garbage dumpster of a McDonalds I used to work at years ago. It had a harness on it...looked like somebody liked to keep him tied up outside or something and he escaped.
It was mid-October when I caught him. It was pretty cool outside so the thing was sluggish and slow. I picked it up and saw that it had guts or something hanging out of it's anus. I figured it got ran over by a car or something.
I took it to a vet to see if he could fix it and adopt it out. I told my BIL about it and he was eager to adopt it so I got back in touch with the vet. He had just finished performing surgery on it and said it was doing fine now. Apparently when those big reptiles spend their whole lives in a relatively small space their muscles atrophy to a degree and, when they manage to get out in the world, they push themselves too hard and rupture or herniate something (he claimed it wasn't an uncommon thing to see).
I drove back to the vet to pick it up so I could deliver it to my BIL. When the vet came out with the monitor in a box, the box was shaking VIOLENTLY. You could hear the thing in there scrambling around like mad, just trying to get out.
I took the lizard to my FIL, where my BIL was going to pick it up, and opened the box to take it out. The lizard was sitting in the bottom of the box, just staring at me calmly. I reached down to pick it up and the SOB jumped up, like lightning, and clamped down on my hand. It felt like my hand was snagged by a large pair of HOT pliers. I wouldn't have imagined it hurting as bad as it did. I immediately regretted my decision to try to save this creature's life.
Managed to get it into a cage and it let go of my hand as soon as its feet hit the bottom of the cage. My hand was bleeding pretty bad and the lizard had blood all over its mouth....looked like it had just came back from a fresh kill.
BIL came and got the lizard. Took it home to Arkansas and kept it for many years before it passed away. He told me that it never bit him once.
Since that day I have handled exactly ZERO savannah monitor lizards.
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It is called a prolapse and it is actually quite common in the larger lizards. It can happen as a result of an impaction, pushing too hard, or simply not enough exercise. It is usually remedied by putting in slowly dissolving sutures.