hotdogs? are you serious?

[reptastic]

so yesterday was rodent day for my tegus and snake, went to the freezer and no mice or rats. so i went to the closest pet shop i could find, although they charge twice as much for rodents i had very little choice. so i asked the guys and girl standing at the register for 2 large mice(ft) and 1 live then i asked if they had any ft. rat pups or mice fuzzy and one of the guys ask " what are you feeding" i reply 2 tegus and a ball pythonhe ask "columbian?" i say no argentine he says "you know you can just give em hotdogs" im like they need raw meat and they wont eat them because they're cooked he goes" they're not cooked , i feed em to my 2 ft. tegu all the time" im just standing there looking confused. hotdogs? seriously? who would feed there tegus hotdogs. and i hope he wasnt trying to say they were better than rodent. this is why many people when going to a petshop are misinformed about the animal they are getting. i remember a few years back @ the same place an associate was trying to sell an iguana to a lady and her kid, and he told her it would only grow depending on the cage size, wtf? an iguana will grow to 6' in a 10 gal(definately not recommended) but you cant stop an iguana from growing. and why would you want to? just another reason i dont go to this store!

 

[merlinsdrgn]

He didn't by any chance mention that tegus eat hot dogs in the wild all the time did he? lol... what a moron...

 

[txrepgirl]

Thank God I wasn't there. I would off given them a piece of my mind. People like them shouldn't even work at a pet store. Don't the managers have the new employes take some test on what they know about the animals ? Hot Dogs have so much junk in it it's not even good for people. I better stop before I get to heated up with this. Sorry. I'm just glad that at least you know what you are doing.

 

[chelvis]

LOL its funny becuase i remember that igunana myth... it took 6 months before i could convince my boss it was just a myth and that they will grow bigger. His reason to belive it was true, none of our iggys ever got bigger becuase of the small cages. I set one up in a back room with proper heat, light, food and humidity all in a ten gallon tank (keep in mind this was 6 years ago and to prove a point). A month later the iggy was way too big for the tank, my boss claimed I put it on stariods. I still work in pet stores and there are no test when it comes to pet care, the most i've had was a basic training of dog foods (which was completly wrong and i got writen up to corperate for causing problems).

I've heard even reptile specialty stores tell people to feed tegus cat food and hot dogs... only to see the same person in a few months later in with a very sick and lathargic tegu.

I could go on and on, 7 years in pet retail hasn't driven me nuts, from mom and pop petstores to the large national chains to producers and distributor i'll tell you what i tell customers, reasurch becuase the pet industry doesnt care about your individual pet they only care about the bottom line....

sorry bout the rant!

 

[reptastic]

He didn't by any chance mention that tegus eat hot dogs in the wild all the time did he? lol... what a moron...

I cant imagine what condition his tegu lives in, i passed up a female before i got my nero because he fed her bolona and other junk. thats why i dont shop there, their reptiles look horrible, the iguanas aare all ridden with mbd they had a burmese with a big rat bite on its back, i dont think it had medical treatment they just knocked the price down a $100 its sad that they are still in business. btw your beardie has the same name as my tegu lol achilles rocks :grno

 

[rrcoolj]

People are so ignorant. Is it really that hard to google "black and white tegu"? I mean were not saying spend an hour at the library it's googling 4 words! The sad thing is it's not stupidity it's ignorance which makes it worse. people just won't research what thier getting like it's forebidden or something. I love reading about new animals and I don't mind but c'mon how long could it take to read a couple of paragraphs that will cover atleast how big it gets and what it eats?

Sheesh! I would have been thrown out the store...

 

[Two Bananas Marinade]

Hot dogs? Everyone here knows that beer and pizza are the most nutritious for any reptile. Excuse me while I go drag Blender out of his hide and give him some Ben and Jerry's Dublin Mudslide ice cream.

 

[reptastic]

Nero says shell take some, but not to much she has to watch her figure! but achilles says bring on the beer and pizza!

 

[White_Lotus]

I find this kind of care sharing sad...we all know what he said was wrong. So did you correct him on this? Did you try to introduce to him the correct tegu diet? If someone tells you something wrong dont critize them on a forum and not tell them if they're doing something wrong...more than likely he just never knew but if he did thats a totally different story. I do agree that he's a tad ignorant but unless someone teaches him or tells him he will continue to be ignorant and share his misguided husbandry ideas...someone needs to communicate these things to help spread the knowledge i mean for goodness sakes you should tell him to join this forum point him in the direction of the food list thats was created on here. I'm not talking down or anything but in this day and age we need to progress forward as a community not just point out people who are doing things wrong...I am personally guilty of the same thing i just talk about things after i see how aweful they are but that doesnt help the animal at all and it makes me feel like a hypocrite when i think about it...i say i love animals but i dont love an animal enough to tell someone your doing something wrong? Some owners dont agree with it and only care about making money. I know the pet store i bought my chacoan from the owner is an awesome woman but they couldnt keep up with a chacoan they couldnt afford to feed it until it was full everyday. They didnt want to pay for the correct lighting which led to minor MBD in it's tail, but if they are personally keeping herps how do you think those are being taken care of?
We need to be more :hug and :slap and less :bahi then :bolt if you know what i mean >.<

 

[Pikey]

My Red (Penny) & B&W (Liz) came from a kid who talked his mommy into buying them for him. Had them for 2 yrs in a 75Gal tank full screen top.
was told by PetCo that they are like a puppy, so he treated them like puppies like feeding them table scraps (even told me in an email he feed them pinky mice, dog food, & pizza) i was so f*cking pissed off at him.
he was selling them on Craigslist (not them but if you bought the cage & stuff you could have the lizards) wanted $375 i paid $240 for them
my wife picked them up & he told her that the B&W got out last summer & they found him in late fall by the back door.

she got them home & she had to stop me from driving back to his house & kicking him in the face.... So i called him & yelled about the condition they were in & how could he take such bad care of them, he laughed and said "so" then hung up on me


so 6 months later they are both in perfect health:
Penny is Finlay shedding the 4 layers of retained shed
and is growing back the tip of her tail (still missing 7 toes but hasn't lost any since i got her)

 

[Melissa]

Ya sounds like this guy just has no idea OR is just trying to be cheap. I hope you informed him and gave him varnyardscare sire addy. Its sad and scary to know that someone else will go and ask for advice on these animals and be told feed them hotdogs and not know better and then tell others the same thing. If he is just to stubborn to listen I would have seriously talked to his supervisor and explained why tegus cant eat hotdogs.

 

[Jefroka]

It is our duty as responsible pet owners to inform the powers that be when vagrantly inaccurate info is being doted out, thus leading to animal cruelty. Go to the store manager, supervisor, whomever and politely state the facts.

Perhaps even contact the humane society in your area and report the abusers, but for the sake of the animals we all need to speak up on their behalf.


...Jefroka

 

[Kaz]

I know these posts are really old, but you guys are perpetuating myths about tegus that are not based in fact.

You absolutely can feed tegus cooked meat. That they are an ectotherm with a different means of digesting doesn't prevent that, and the idea that it does is inductive reasoning with no science behind it. Some tegus won't eat cooked mean mainly because they're not used to it. There are tegus fed exclusively cooked meat who are just as averse to suddenly being fed raw.

If you do feed them cooked food, either it should not be all the time, or you need to ensure that the plants you also feed them supplement some of the nutrients in raw meat but not cooked meat, like vitamin C.

Of course if you feed a tegu hot dogs all the time, there's also the question of whether nitrites are bad for them. But feeding them hot dogs once in a while is no problem at all.

So all the gasping and virtue signalling about the pet store owner feeding hot dogs to tegus above is bad information. It's probably not a good idea for it to be a main food for the tegu, but is absolutely fine as a small part of a more complex diet.

Oh, and the guy saying "do tegus eat hot dogs in the wild"...what an absurd bit of abductive reasoning. Humans didn't eat hot dogs in the wild, either. In fact, they didn't eat cooked food at all until a couple million years ago, either. When they started eating cooked food, it appears to have increased their health and allowed them to grow larger brains. Proteins in cooked food are more accessible to any creature eating them than the same food raw, and some micronutrients are as well. "In the wild" is not sound reasoning for drawing a conclusion, only one component of possible evidence to weigh.

 

[Debita]

Most of us will have to go back and study inductive, deductive, and abductive reasoning to really get the interesting points of your comment. I do agree with you, and your point about the pet store clerk. I don't believe that our precious Tegus require perfect diets if you think about how easily they digest rotten items (and substrate for that matter). For anyone that wants to diversify their Tegu's diet and explore hot dogs.... there's plenty of non-nitrite products out there.

I have this vision of a Tegu running across the sand next to a long snuffed out campfire, and seeing that old pieces of hot dog were left to the local wildlife to find. I doubt he'd pass them up. He'd be digging to find every one of them.

 

[tenkarapop]

Thanks Kaz.. As someone who is researching before getting a tegu, i was really starting to lose hope with this forum because it just seems its full of wanna-be tegu masters that fail to use sound logic to make conclusions. I agree 100% with you.. To think that opportunistic feeders such as tegus wouldn’t eat a discarded hot dog in the wild seems unreasonable. Im sure they would be be perfectly fine eating them if they hapend to come across one. thanks !