Feeding – Rodents
The feeding of rodents to a Savannah Monitor is an increasingly controversial topic, centered around both profit motive and a profound lack of knowledge. No one is sure the origins of the idea to feed vertebrates to an invertebrate feeder, but it’s evident today that the few loud, dominant proponents of an all-rodent feeding regimen actually own lucrative frozen rodent feeder businesses. It would be worth it to maintain a healthy skepticism when receiving any information on this monitor, before determining just who has what financial stake in the purchases you are making for your reptile.
As Bennett observed and was quoted as saying in the introduction to this section, the Savannah Monitor is an invertebrate feeder and had fed on mammals with a frequency of less than .2%. If the animal feeds primarily on insects and mollusks in the wild, why feed it anything else in captivity?
The first argument is that keepers in captivity have a great opportunity to offer food items to the monitor that are “nutritionally superior”, an opportunity to give the monitor variety it doesn’t have in the wild. It is argued that rodents are part of this nutritionally superior feeding plan.
The truth is nothing but the opposite. It doesn’t take a zoology degree to take a quick look at our “success” in captive care of the Savannah Monitor and see a long string of obesity, subsequent health problems and causes of death related to feeding monitors a diet incredibly high in fat. If this rodent-based feeding plan is supposed to be superior, are we really doing all that well? Compare the lean body structure and limb strength of any wild Savannah Monitor with a tubby, fat-bodied, stick-legged captive, and it will be more than evident that something in the food/metabolic cycle is severely off.
The second argument is that the Savannah Monitor only eats insects and mollusks due to low availability of rodents in the wild.
On the contrary, rodents and many other prey are plentiful in the regions in which the monitor inhabits, and the senses of the Savannah Monitor are acute in that a quick flick of the tongue and the monitor would know exactly what sort of animal is at the bottom of the burrow it is peeking into.
As has already been said, the Savannah Monitor is simply a specialized feeder, unlike the majority of other monitors. It eats what is best for it, and what its body has adapted to eat, namely insects and mollusks.