Lee W
New Member
- Messages
- 11
Hi everyone! It’s been about a year now since I got my gold tegu, Tengri, and while I’d love to celebrate, I’ve unfortunately been having some troubles. She has become very difficult to handle as she never sits still and hates to be held. I had been taking a pretty slow approach to handling her by always letting her come to me first, and letting her know where my hand is before scooping her up and such. She was flighty as a baby but she still trusted me enough to not be afraid of my hands and even sleep under a blanket with me often. Despite spending hours with her daily, I’m afraid this patient, more laid back approach might have hindered her tolerance to being handled. I’ve always scooped her up rather than pick her up from behind because I didn’t want to seem like a predator to her, but now she just jumps off my hand whenever I do. I’ve resorted to picking her up from behind, and while I still let her know I’m there when I do it, she squirms right out and runs away. She knows my scent, as I’ve done the shirt in enclosure trick and she doesn’t seem to want to bite my hands, she just wants nothing to do with me. The only way I can handle her is to tire her out to the point where she submits defeat, but this just doesn’t feel fair to her or like the right thing to do. I’m very conflicted because I’m not sure if this is tegu puberty, or standard gold attitude, or both. I’m really hoping to be able to tame her down, as I’d love to be able to put her on a harness to take her outside and just have a nice lizard buddy in general. I’m just uncertain if she ever will calm down, as this is a weird situation where I feel force handling is the only option, but I don’t know if that would just be counter productive. I just know I don’t want a defensive, full grown tegu in another year and I’m sure it will be even more difficult to give her to a good home if it comes to that, so I’m not sure if I should just keep trying or consider rehoming sooner rather than later. Thank you for reading, any advice is much appreciated!