Living with Monsters

The mighty predator is stalking his prey in our living room: An unsuspecting shoe. He's gonna bite it, drag it into a corner and then he'll chew around on it for five minutes. I gotta keep an eye on him, because he's just waiting for me to stop looking, so he can sneak off into the kitchen and steal the cat food. He tolerates the cats, though, food envy aside. He's visiting my cat inside her little cardboard box, but I don't think they speak the same language. He's a bit hyper. Been a while since his last walk.

Hard to believe Hugo Bosc looked like that just a year ago:

Now he's a 4ft monster, which is still growing. And will be, for the rest of his life. Which may well be another two or three decades. And he fascinates me more and more each day. Look at this:

It's hard to describe how excited I am about this guy living with us, without sounding like a complete lunatic. What you can see here is a completely tame, friendly and extremely curious reptile. He stands up on his tail and hind legs and even climbs on his bag of soil to have a better look at what's going on in his tank, he plays with his shoe and he walks up to me to have a drink and say hello. Hugo rests and warms up in his tank, but other than that, he spends a lot of time walking around the house. It felt weird and I was a bit paranoid the first couple of times, because I didn't know what to expect.

I knew nothing about monitor lizards when we got him, the usual guides and manuals about proper care and feeding aside. The idea of having him roam around the place seemed stupid at best - he'd probably get stuck under some furniture and crap everywhere! But as it turned out, I didn't give the big guy enough credit.
Claire started "training" him for this sort of thing when he was still a baby. She'd hold him by the tail and follow him around the place as he explored everything. He wasn't even half the size of our cats back then, so if anything scared him or or he tried to run away, Claire would be right there. Nowadays he shares the place with our cats, he's fully housebroken and completely clean and he's utterly fun to watch. Sadly, what you can't see on the video is how he climbed up her leg at one point. That was pretty surprising, although he was probably just looking for food.

I'm amazed by this for two reasons. First of all, it's incredibly exciting to live with an intelligent, exotic animal like him. I've always had cats, my parents had a dog, but how much cooler is it to share the couch with a big freakin' lizard? Well... unless you're totally disgusted by lizards, I suppose. How many of you can say that they watch tv, cuddle and play with a lizard? And I'm not talking about something that just puts up with you like a bearded dragon. I love beardies, but let's face it - they just put up with it. You pick 'em up, place them on your shoulder or in your lap and most of the time they just stay there, because they have nowhere else to go and they do very little aside from eating and sleeping. Having a 4 foot monster play tug of war with you is an entirely different story. Yes, tug of war:

April 2013

The other reason I'm so in awe of our monster is how monitor lizards are still so completely new as pets. Humans have owned dogs and cats have owned humans for as long as any of them existed. But while Mr. John Caveman took care of his domestic, furry sabretooth animals, he probably didn't care much for gimp dinosaurs. Especially since proper UV lighting and heating arrangements were incredibly hard to afford back in the stone age.

Big lizards aren't very well-documented. Self-proclaimed experts, reptile enthusiasts and pet owners argue about the perfect set-up, ideal food and substrate, as well as pet behaviour, intelligence and personality. Monitor lizards aren't as well-explored as more common pets and most pet monitors aren't tame and rarely ever leave their tanks. Having Hugo run around the place along with our other animals and getting him used to them, spending a fair amount of time playing with him and keeping him active every day - the whole thing isn't just new to us; it's new full stop. The fact that he could be so friendly and playful and have such an inquisitive nature is completely unexpected and utterly fascinating.

We'd fully expect this kind of behaviour from a cat or a dog, but associating these things with a cold-blooded reptile, a creature most of us would expect to be boring, aggressive and slimy, is forever changing the way I look at these guys. I dare not say how much of this is just natural, territorial behaviour and looking for food, but to be fair, when my cat comes sucking up to me, it's usually just about food, as well. We still love and appreciate them for that, so why not give a little credit to Hugo, who will play with you and climb up your leg, ulteriour motive or not?

- Cat