Monitor....meat ball?

Someone had told me about a Premium monitor diet out on the market, and i could of swore he said Monitor Meat Ball. Can someone fill me in here? Can you also list some more premium monitor diets? My black rough neck just isn't getting the diverse diet i want her too, and she seems to like the smelly can stuff

Let me know.

Thanks.

raiquee said:

Someone had told me about a Premium monitor diet out on the market, and i could of swore he said Monitor Meat Ball. Can someone fill me in here? Can you also list some more premium monitor diets? My black rough neck just isn't getting the diverse diet i want her too, and she seems to like the smelly can stuff

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The best premium monitor diet out there is rodents. All you need is rodents (at least for most mid to large sized monitors, like black rough necks). A complete nutritional package in convenient bite sized serving samples. Buy them frozen, store them in your freezer, thaw to feed. You can round out the diet with all sorts of other stuff if you want - I give mine turkey and chicken giblets, any meat that has been freezer burned or that has been left out too long, plus chicks, roaches, and so on. But rodents are fine for a staple.

Anything that comes in a can is not really worth it. More expensive and less nutritous than a rodent. I would suggest sticking to what has been proven to work, and that's the mice and rats.

Good luck,

Luke

She is one rodents, in fact that is ALL she will eat. Which isn't good for her. She needs diversity, hence why i was inquiring about a good monitor diet out there. She'd get a lot of rodents, but she won't have anything to do with insects really, so i would perfer to offer her canned to "round it out" per say.

Thank you.

This post mentions the San Diego Zoo varanid diet. I think a combo of supplemented ground turkey and whole rodents would probably do the trick.

http://forum.kingsnake.com/rhac/messages/5397.html

raiquee said:

She is one rodents, in fact that is ALL she will eat. Which isn't good for her. She needs diversity

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No, she doesn't. It has been shown time and again that monitors can be raised up healthy, hardy, and active on a diet of only rodents. They contain everything a monitor needs to live and grow.

raiquee said:

hence why i was inquiring about a good monitor diet out there. She'd get a lot of rodents, but she won't have anything to do with insects really, so i would perfer to offer her canned to "round it out" per say.

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Rather than some canned food full of preservatives and who knows what else, and horribly overpriced, too, try chicken hearts, or chicken wings, or ground turkey, or bits of fish. Add vitamin and mineral supplements if you feed these often (meat alone is deficient in calcium without the bones), but don't worry about it too much if she's already getting a lot of rodents.

Good luck,

Luke

I know of a water monitor that was purchased so small it still had it's bellybutton. It was initially fed goldfish and crickets. When it was very small two or three small feeder goldfish would fill it up.

This monitor turned 6 last august. He's close to 6 ft. long and weighs just a tad over 50 lbs. I know this because I had to help weigh him. He is fed only rats and mice. Lots and lots of them from what I hear.

He is one hefty healthy boy. Rodents is goooooood monitor food.

Thing here is... There are a good number of monitors filling a wide variety of ecological niches and having adapted to utilize the nutritional content of the prey species they naturally encounter.

For *some* monitors, rodents can be a staple in the diet and they'll be perfectly healthy. For *some* monitors an all rodent diet will just lead to severe obesity and all of the assorted related problems.

For a black roughneck, mixing it up is very important. They're a smallish to medium sized species that spends most of their time off the ground... They'll grab mammilian prey when they find it but they're really built to eat bugs (big bugs), other herps and herp eggs and the oddball bird/bird egg. If a keeper is familiar with the species and can guage the animal's health and is willing to keep a close eye on their physique and behavior for any signs that the diet is a bit much then I'd say that having fifty-maybe sixty five percent of the diet being rodent based would be acceptable... if a keeper has limited experience with the species, then I'd reccomend no more than about forty percent. Geckos of an appropriate size are usually inexpensive enough as feeders; be they kinked animals or just some bulk pricing they end up being *about* equal to the cost of rodents if you want to stock up and most roughnecks'll eat thawed ones so... stockpiling is easy enough. Anoles are readily avaliable and inexpensive even for ones which have been wormed. Green and gray treefrogs, green frogs (not pickerels, make sure you know the difference) and leopard frogs are all acceptable prey items and fairly inexpensive. Breeding roaches is about the easiest thing in the world and if it's big enough and moving around it's been my experience that roughnecks will take them... I'd shy away from chicken eggs because of the high instances of salmonella (a much more virulent strain than is carried by herps) and ecoli however button quail eggs and chicks make great feeders.

In addition to this ground cooked turkey and the canned stuff are acceptable as long as they're used in moderation... I mention them really only because they were already in the thread. They won't kill an animal overnight but generally aren't great.

One option... not for the faint of heart and weak of stomach... Varanids will usually take dead prey and what can really only be described as mush. If your roughneck is easting mush... make it the mush you want to see him feeding on. Buy a blender, make sure you write all over it so nobody tries to make fruit smoothies with it or something... and then blend prekilled prey items into a paste. The paste can be frozen (icecube trays) and then thawed as needed and as is appropriate based on the size of the animal and it lets you supply exactly what you want the animal to be eating without having to make detailed notes or play around with coaxing down a prey item the animal doesn't preffer.

If a keeper is familiar with the species and can guage the animal's health and is willing to keep a close eye on their physique and behavior for any signs that the diet is a bit much then I'd say that having fifty-maybe sixty five percent of the diet being rodent based would be acceptable... if a keeper has limited experience with the species, then I'd reccomend no more than about forty percent.

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And just to clarify a bit... that forty percent is STILL with someone keeping a close eye on the animal. Under ideal conditions a black roughneck would be seeing at MOST about 20% of their diet as rodents. They're really built for chowing on lizards and it reflects in what their body will synthesize, what it won't synthesize and the caloric uptake required to keep them active and healthy.

Seamus Haley said:

For a black roughneck, mixing it up is very important. They're a smallish to medium sized species that spends most of their time off the ground... They'll grab mammilian prey when they find it but they're really built to eat bugs (big bugs), other herps and herp eggs and the oddball bird/bird egg. If a keeper is familiar with the species and can guage the animal's health and is willing to keep a close eye on their physique and behavior for any signs that the diet is a bit much then I'd say that having fifty-maybe sixty five percent of the diet being rodent based would be acceptable... if a keeper has limited experience with the species, then I'd reccomend no more than about forty percent.

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And yet the most experienced and successful breeder of black rough necks feeds her animals only rodents. Hmmmm. Makes me think that perhaps all this complication is not necessary after all. If you want to try the other stuff, go ahead. Knock yourself out. But it is not necessary.

Luke

hey i have heard a lot about feeding a moniter meat other then rodents like one person said they feed theirs steak and do you cook the meat because i know that the moniters will eat raw meat out in the wild

madragon said:

hey i have heard a lot about feeding a moniter meat other then rodents like one person said they feed theirs steak and do you cook the meat because i know that the moniters will eat raw meat out in the wild

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Be careful here. If you feed a diet of mostly cuts of meat, you risk dietary deficiencies due to lack of calcium and vitamins. Be sure to supplement with multivitamins and minerals if cut meat is to be a significnt portion of the monitor's diet. You don't need to worry about this if you feed them things with the bones and guts still in.

As for cooking or not, it does not matter. The monitors will eat it either way. Really, monitors eat essentially anything they can cram down their throats.

Note that feeding cut meats leads to a lot messier and stinkier monitor poo. Feces from a rodent based diet are a lot more pleasant and easy to clean up for some reason (I'm guessing the hair).

Luke

Rodents are all they need..

If the question is, do you feel like giving them something else because your bored of what they eat, then why as no monitor species needs anything to eat in captivity buy a rodent based diet, an easy to use easy to feed, convenient package with the right amount of soluable fiber, insoluable fiber, nutrients, minerals etc. If "you" feel like they want or you want them to have extra stuff then by all means base their diet off of rodents (most of their diet), then offer chicken peeps, roaches, crickets, superworms, etc, dont worry about feeding people food, dogfood, or cat food to a monitor. A bit of info on canned food, if its made for cats, dogs, or other animals it specifies "not for human consumption" or "not for animals to be used in human consumption" theres a law that says the manufacturer doesnt have to tell you the truth of whats inside because the law covers people food only. So you have no idea whats in any canned, bagged, manufactured food, why risk it? Stick with a diet that has proven to raise hatchlings to adults, allow adults to breed from very very young ages, and to multiclutch constantly, whole rodents. Usually when someone says "My monitor needs variety", they have either read this in a petstore monitor book, or they are bnot getting results from their husbandry so they think a different food will solve their problems, yet it wont. If a rodent based diet allows every life event, and no other diet does, then why try something thats a waste of time, put that money and time back into a bigger better cage, etc. In the wild monitors are extreme generalists they adapt to eat whatever is in abundance that allows the most return with the least effort, its called survival, so we as keepers eliminate the stresses and problems they face in the wild, so therefore we shuld offer them the best diet we possibly can. If you choose to feed them whatever you want thats up to you, just admit its for you, not for them, if its for them it would be whole animal foods only. Rodents do not and have never caused any negative problems or issues with monitors in captivity, substandard care sich as bad caging, bad temp selections, bad humidity selections, bad substrate selections, etc cause those health problems, along with stress.

I personally do not believe monitors need only rodents as a sole diet. I found a canned diet she likes, and i mix super worms and crickets in with vitamin supplements. She gets this twice a week. She gets rodents twice a week and i give her a boiled chicken egg once every two weeks. I may look into quail eggs however. I will also try picking up some lean ground turkey and feeding that to her cooked. I will also very well be looking up feeder geckos and frogs. She got ahold of a house gecko and cherished it

My black rough neck is my baby. I don't care if its more work to change up her diet. I can tell she does better on it. Her poops look better, and aren't coming out like rocks. If you and the leading black rough neck breeder wants to feed all rodents, by all means do so. But do not bring me down for changing up her diet. My post was to find out a good canned food. All i expected was replies to that. Not on how i should take care of my monitor. I know what is good for her and whats not. And from all the books i have read, it says vary the diet.

In fact here is a quote: "Black roughnecks feed upon terrestrial anthropods and microhylid frogs in the wild, and should be fed insects, earthworms, small lizards, and frogs as captives."

Also

"Sprakland (1992) recommends against the use of mice and baby chickens as a staple diet for this species because of their "fragile" snouts, and the propensity for constipation (gee, thats what mine got) or vomiting by these lizards kept on this type of diet."

Both taken from "Popular Monitors and Tegus" by Michael Balsai from The Herpetocultural Library. Page 119 if you want to read it yourself.

Its your choice to do with your monitor as you choose..

As well your choice to believe whats written in "Giant Lizards" which is by far the worst "petstore monitor book" ever written on captive care, also to be followed by Spacklands other book "Savannah and grassland monitors", note something that tells you about Mr. Spackland and his captive care , he cant keep any monitors alive from one book to the next, why is that? If you like that book, then by all means keep it for the pretty pictures, thats all its good for.
Diet, substrate, lighting, etc are all a part of basic care, basic care as proven many many many times in the past 15 years with monitors in captivity has been demonstrated consistantly. Whole animals as a basis for a diet in monitors is the only proven diet, as well the best diet you can give them, it has all of the needed calcium, minerals, vitamins, non-soluable fiber, etc that they need to accomplish all life events. That basic whole animals diet has been proven by the only people who breed monitors, why is it that people who base their monitors diet off of rodents (except odatria) are the only people who gave monitors breeding sucessfully in captivity? Why is it that the oldest, largest, and multiclutching monitors are fed a diet based off of rodents (except odatria)?
You just have to consider the facts, you dont need to answer the questions here, I already know the answers. These are proven facts, not opinions such as the choice so many make for their own personal preferences and feelings, not knowledge, or experience to feed dogfood, catfood, peoplefood, or canned monitor food which has no laws covering it as far as ingredients, because it states "not for human consumption" they can tell you anything they want to for ingredients. It could have raw heat extruded sewage, and the law doesnt cover it.
Ill stick to what works, what doesnt give them a runny stool, what has been proven to do the best for them. Of course I also have 14 years of experience with monitors, and over 20 with reptiles to tell me what happens when you keep them wrong.
Its your choice, there are alot of inexpensive, imported monitors for now available to replace yours with for following R.G.Sparacklands advice, a million others have followed it to, look where it got them. This is why 16,000 nile monitors are imported every year to the pet trade alone, also 25,000 plus bosc monitors a year to the US for the pet trade alone (these figures dont cover for the skin trade, its higher yet). You can check these figures with CITES, and with the US customs, they publish them every year. This is just 2 commonly kept species, not including the water monitor, etc etc.
Ive used canned monitor food in the past, several brands, the best one was Zupreem, but thats not saying much, most monitors unless very hungry wont eat that crap.
Have a nice day.