lacertas, beef heart, and dog food

So the other day I fed my jeweled lacerta a small piece of frozen beef heart fish food out of curiosity, and I woke up the next morning to him following me back and forth in his tank waiting for more.

I love him to death but unfortunately he's not super great at figuring out food is food until he's taking it from the tongs or it wiggles. Since he loved the beef heart so much I decided to try an experiment. In this instance, I used a piece of beef heart to scent a slice of grain free chicken dog food. (Freshpet, the kind you can get in the refrigerator section of your pet store.) For the first time ever he actually picked up a dropped piece and ate it without being fed directly.

I'm not necessarily advocating feeding lacertas like this as a staple, but if you need to put weight on one of these guys or train them to take non-moving food on their own this might be just the ticket.

It may be obvious to more experienced people to try this combination, but this post might be useful to some newbie like me.