Meet Ra

[spinosaurus1]

i decided to make a series of short videos showing the taming process of Ra, my baby Nile monitor. purchased him at repticon back in March. gorgeous lizard with the brightest yellow coloration i ever seen.

so now i'm working on taming him. he currenly eats crickets and dubia roaches off of tweezers. i also spend long periods of time infront of his cage. getting him aquainted with my presence. he's still very skittish ( as to expect from any young lizard) but i'm glad he isn't owning up to the nile monitor reputation. at least not from what i currently see 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFv-W8yLoPA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7pT6DyyAQE&t=18s

[Kaprosaurus]

He looks adorable! I really want to get any sort of reptile,but my favorites are leopard geckos and frilled lizards.Is it hard to tame a monitor?

[Lanthanotus]

Hello and congraz to that new pet of yours, an astonishing but often enough underrated and misunderstood species.

As a long time keeper, breeder and layman scientist on varanoid lizards I highly recommend another approach to the "taming" process though. The behaviour the animal shows in the second video is hardly the beginning of a tame or docile behaviour, but caution and fear. If you watch for the animal's body you recognize that it is averted, head held down to the ground, laying still and hardly moving at all. That is now wonder though, as young monitor lizards - despite being already a big deal bigger than a lot of other reptile species in their environment - have a lot of enemies, in water, on land and in the air. Young monitor lizards of all species are almost never observed in the wild for that reason, they are simply to cautious and altert (all the youngling imports you can buy from the retailer come from collected and hatched eggs or caged nests).

So to give it a good start, decorate the husbandry tank with a lot of plants and brachnes to provide cover. That may sound counterproductive, but an animal feeling save in its very own home, is more likely to dare coming out and develop some positive behaviour towards its keeper than an animal forced to be in the open all time. Think of yourself, you'd want some privacy aswell.

In general, a good and reliable method for "taming" is target conditioning, a method that relies on basic learning abilites and positive feedback given with small (!) food items - even fish can be trained with that method.