What is the size of her cages?Does every cage have a source

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Posted by Flavia Guimaraes on February 12, 2003 at 16:25:07:

In Reply to: CA Press: The Iguana Woman of San Jose posted by W von Papine�u on February 10, 2003 at 20:24:16:

of heat and humidity??Although she lives in California the temp can be cold during winter, am i right?If each of her lizards' cage is 2 meters lenght(around 6 ft), she has a corridor of 80 meters of cages!!!Does she have money to pay the vet's bills for all these lizards??Does she have time to tame or even to rub and pet all these lizards??I dont know but IMHO she seems to be a collector not a rescuer, what do you think??

:SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE (Califronia) 10 February 03 The Iguana Woman of San Jose (Hank Pellissier)
:Sandy Binns lives in San Jose with her husband, John, her son, Donald, and her daughter, Nicole -- plus 31 iguanas and 10 other lizards. Our interview occurred in her newly remodeled kitchen, which iguanas strolled into for snacks and cuddling.
:How did you get started with these big lizards? Where did you get them?
:I got my first lizard in 1997. My husband, John, and I went to the Hollister Independence Motorcycle Rally, and we saw a beautiful, huge green iguana there. After we did some research on them, we bought a hatchling named Rex, who we still have. As we learned more about iguanas, we became increasingly fascinated.
:Many of our pets are rescues from appalling situations. We got four green iguanas from a pet store where they were squashed into a tiny cage. Their water was filthy with feces, and they were all bitten up because they were fighting each other. Many of their fingers were broken, and one of the females had no spines left -- they had all been chewed off.
:Iguanas are solitary creatures; they get together only to mate, and they will fight if they're put in the same cage. Unfortunately, many pet stores are run by ill-informed people who don't know how to properly care for them.
:Do you have separate cages for all these iguanas?
:Most are kept in pens in the backyard, but there are exceptions. The iguanas that you see in the house are free ranging. They all have their own nest area in the house that they hang out in. Slim -- the orange iguana that you held -- he sleeps on John's printer, Tina sleeps next to the couch in John's office, Happy lives in the upstairs bathroom and Blue stays in the master bedroom.
:They are all basically potty trained; if we lay paper down, they'll use it. Slim even goes potty in the bathtub, and then we sanitize it with diluted Clorox. We also put in hardwood floors throughout the house.
:Are lizards dangerous?
:The Gila monster, from the U.S. Southwest, is venomous, and the Komodo dragon of Indonesia is also deadly because the saliva in its mouth is filled with gross bacteria. But iguanas typically only bite or strike if they feel threatened, and about half the bites that I have gotten have not even broken the skin. I have never had to get stitches, but an untreated bite can harbor infection.
:You're obviously very fond of lizards. Why?
:Their behavior. Lizards seem distant in cages, but, interacting with them, I find them to be very personable. They're also peaceful, calming, to be around.
:Emotionally, they are driven by their environment and their hormones. If they're laying in the sunshine and it's not mating season, they are as sweet as little kittens. But if females are gravid [pregnant], they can be very protective of themselves. They can hiss and slap their tails to say, "Go away. Leave me alone!" And male iguanas are more aggressive during mating season, like guys drinking at a bar. I was bitten by a rock iguana on the arm once on one of his high-hormone days.
:Also, iguanas do have different personalities. Tina -- a blue-iguana hybrid -- is assertive, strong willed and determined, but she wants to crawl up on my lap and be held for an hour. She really likes physical attention. Others don't want to be handled much, but they do want me to notice them, so they'll rub up against my leg.
:Kids love lizards. I take my pets to elementary schools -- small lizards like my uromastyx from Morocco and the tegu from Argentina, and I also take a big blue-iguana hybrid to show kids variety in size. I let the kids touch the skin, I tell them a little bit about each one and I tell them that if they ever want to get one, they really need to research them first so they know how to care for them.
:"Blue-iguana hybrid" -- what does that mean?
:It means the iguana is a combination of blue iguana mated with another rock-iguana type, typically either a Cuban or a caymanensis. The fact is, there are only 90-120 pure-blooded blue iguanas left in the world. The species is in severe decline because a lot of iguana habitat is getting plowed down.
:Blue iguanas are a subset of rock iguanas, and the whole genus is headed for extinction. This information has gotten John and me very involved in iguana conservation; we spend vacations securing sanctuaries for them, and we've established the International Reptile Conservation Foundation.
:Where are iguanas from? I know they're located in the Galapagos Islands, but where else?
:Originally, they are from Mexico, Central America -- and there are different iguanas from many of the Caribbean islands. There's also a species in the U.S. Southwest called the chuckwalla, and there are now green iguanas all over Florida. They have escaped into the Everglades in prolific numbers.
:Do you want to own more lizards? I mean, 41 seems like a lot.
:I'd be happy to just put them all back in the wild, in their natural habitat, but I can't do that. It's illegal, because they'll take diseases into the jungle. They also wouldn't survive, because of the natural competition.
:I am committed to taking care of these lizards for the remainder of their significant life spans, but I don't really want any more, and we try to prevent them from breeding. Green iguanas can lay up to 50 eggs.
:Do your neighbors know you have big lizards here? What do they think?
:We try to keep it low profile because some people have an aversion to reptiles. We don't parade them around on the sidewalk. We also have high fences and no trees near the fences so the lizards can't leap into a neighbor's yard. For a while, we had two 5 1/2-foot-long black-throated monitor lizards named Dino and Pebbles, and they would have definitely frightened people if they had gotten loose.
:Do your children like the lizards?
:Nicole and Donald have mixed feelings. They like them, but they get exhausted with the lizard chores -- about 30-60 minutes a day of cage cleaning, feeding, checking the lightbulbs, etc. My son is very good with animals, but he isn't interested in a profession with them. Nicole -- who is 13 years old -- says she would like to be a vet. She's trying to build a prosthetic leg for Walter, our rhinoceros iguana that lost one leg to a bone infection when he was bitten at the Indianapolis Zoo.
:Do you have any unusual lizards that aren't iguanas?
:We have a basilisk lizard. They're called "Jesus lizards" because they can sprint across calm water with their long fingers that have weblike skin between them. We also have a blue-tongued skink. It sticks out its beautiful aqua-colored, ribbonlike tongue to scare its predators away.
:Do you recommend iguanas as pets to the average person?
:No. They're extremely high maintenance. I wish someone would put controls on selling iguanas, because people aren't educated in how to care for them. Very few pet iguanas live to their normal life span, which is 18-25 years. Iguanas in captivity usually die in 6-8 years.
:Iguanas are messy; they poop twice a day, and if you're not around to clean them immediately, it can become a huge mess. Our monthly utility bill is also staggering; iguanas need heat lamps, because they need to be at no less than 75 degrees, and 85-90 degrees is best. They also require daily exercise; they need to walk around and stretch, because if they don't, they will get lethargic and unhealthy.
:Iguanas can die if you give them the wrong diet. The pet store might tell you that you can feed them dog or cat food -- that's a common misconception -- but animal protein puts their kidneys on overload. Kidney failure is one of the leading causes of iguana death. The right diet is 87 percent dark-green vegetables, like collards, mustard greens, turnip greens and dandelion greens, plus 10 percent fruit, like mangoes and papayas, blackberries and raspberries, and 3 percent fiber -- brown rice, green beans, carrots. We also give our lizards calcium supplements. Besides kidney failure, common iguana illnesses are metabolic bone disease, gum disease, pneumonia and shedding-skin disease.
:Finding a good vet is also not an easy task. Many vets have no reptile experience at all, but they'll still give you advice that turns out to be very poor.

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