my veiled has an attitude problem

[Swiftchameleon]

You could try free ranging some crickets so he could catch them himself.

 

[Ashleyth87]

Thanks for the picture. That clears up a lot of questions I was going to ask. Apologies in advance for the clipped tone. I'm tired and late to go somewhere but wanted to write this. Understanding the nature of chameleons--what they are and what they aren't--is so important for the health and happiness of your pet chameleon. You will be happier with your pet when you understand what it can and cannot give you, too. Win win all around.

Okay, let's be clear: Chameleons don't ever have attitude problems. They are not mean. They are not nasty. They are simply chameleons exhibiting chameleon behavior.

Can they be difficult to handle? Yes. Can some always be terrified of their owners until the day they die. Yes. Will they bite and attack out of fear? Again, yes.

Let's just analyse your picture and let's not put any motives or try to figure out what the chameleon is thinking. Let's simply look at the behavior that is being presented.

I see a chameleon that is puffed up. It is looking not at the food item but at your hand about two inches behind the food, the area around the thumb and first finger. The chameleon's left arm is raised. Your hand and the screen seem to be blocking any escape routes. Your hand is within what appears to be one to two inches of it's body. The chameleon appears to be leaning away from your hand and the screen is preventing it from leaning further away or escaping. There do not appear to be any escape routes other than over the hand.

Based on experience, I've found that the raised-arm posture shows a chameleon that is afraid and stressed of something very close to it. Leaning away is also associated with fear. From experience, I've found fear triggers that puffed up behavior. So does territorial aggression between chameleons.

Just from the picture, it appears to me you have trapped a frightened animal between the screen and your hand and it has no escape. It is exhibiting classic fear behaviors--puffing up, arm raised, leaning away and if the screen weren't there, I would also expect escape behaviors.

Now, with all that going on, do you really expect it to take a food that it isn't particularly fond of and eat? Occasionally, extremely stressed animals will eat but the norm is for the stress hormones to suppress appetite.

Hand feeding chameleons is not like hand feeding a mammal. They have an incredibly long tongue and that is what they use to put the food in their mouths. They actually don't like to eat food close to their faces and they don't like to just use their mouths to pick up food although they can learn to eat without using their tongues, but it seems to not be something they prefer to do. They seem to have trouble using their tongue on prey that is close to their faces and will arch up to get distance between the prey item and their face.

To get your chameleon to hand feed, reduce the stress and fear levels in the animal--in other words, get out of its personal space. Chameleons are usually quite easy to read when they are stressed. They change colors or shapes. There is no missing a puffed up animal. Whenever you see your chameleon even start to puff up--they might do it by just starting to throw the throat spikes forward--back out of their space.

Hand feed from a distance. Hand feed food items that are highly desired like green bugs. Start with a hungry chameleon.

One other thing, I don't know if chameleons can smell anything. I have my doubts they use their nose for much other than breathing. I think their nostrils go straight down to front of their mouths, not leaving any room for whatever organ is in a nose that detects odors.

All the best.

That picture isn't usually how i feed him. I can see what you mean by the way it looks. hes larger than he appears in the picture because hes actually about 5 inches away. the angle is misleading. he does have a very wide cage and much of an escape route to his right. I wouldn't corner him with nowhere to go. i was trying to get a picture to make an example of what was going on to someone else .I've tried hand feeding bugs, wriggling crickets and horn worms. After all the advice everyone gave me i left the cage door open for about an hour around feeding time and sat nearby waiting. He finally came out and i sat very still with a worm in my hand and he was about to eat it when it finally wriggle its way out of my hand. I'm working at him slowly and trying not to stress him out in the process. As soon as he gets in defence mode i call it a day. He crawled on me the other day without his throat puffed out a few ago so there's a step in the friendly direction.

 

[jajeanpierre]

That picture isn't usually how i feed him. I can see what you mean by the way it looks. hes larger than he appears in the picture because hes actually about 5 inches away. the angle is misleading. he does have a very wide cage and much of an escape route to his right. I wouldn't corner him with nowhere to go. i was trying to get a picture to make an example of what was going on to someone else .I've tried hand feeding bugs, wriggling crickets and horn worms. After all the advice everyone gave me i left the cage door open for about an hour around feeding time and sat nearby waiting. He finally came out and i sat very still with a worm in my hand and he was about to eat it when it finally wriggle its way out of my hand. I'm working at him slowly and trying not to stress him out in the process. As soon as he gets in defence mode i call it a day. He crawled on me the other day without his throat puffed out a few ago so there's a step in the friendly direction.

It doesn't matter how far away your hand is in inches. It's how much he feels you are intruding in his space. Your picture shows a defensive animal. Do you not recognize the body language he is exhibiting?

Whether you think you have given him an escape route or not, his body language is saying he feels threatened. His perception is all that matters.

Here's another way of understanding what I am trying to say. Take a person who is positively phobic of spiders--like me. Now I know logically that a tarantula in a cage is not going to hurt me. A tarantula out of a cage is not likely to bite me, either. That's my logical mind. I don't even hate spiders--I'm just phobic of them. I have to avert my eyes away from the spiders--even the baby ones--in the pet stores. I feel sick to my stomach just walking past them. There is no way in Hell you could get a tarantula near me without my reacting on very primitive level. It doesn't matter that I have an escape route or that I can squish it really easily. I will always always always react in fear.

Your giving your chameleon an escape route was lost on your chameleon. He was reacting as if he was trapped. Take your own logic out of it and just look at what he is so obviously feeling.

A hungry animal is always a lot more willing to take risks for food. Try withholding food for awhile and see what happens.

 

[Ashleyth87]

It doesn't matter how far away your hand is in inches. It's how much he feels you are intruding in his space. Your picture shows a defensive animal. Do you not recognize the body language he is exhibiting?

Whether you think you have given him an escape route or not, his body language is saying he feels threatened. His perception is all that matters.

Here's another way of understanding what I am trying to say. Take a person who is positively phobic of spiders--like me. Now I know logically that a tarantula in a cage is not going to hurt me. A tarantula out of a cage is not likely to bite me, either. That's my logical mind. I don't even hate spiders--I'm just phobic of them. I have to avert my eyes away from the spiders--even the baby ones--in the pet stores. I feel sick to my stomach just walking past them. There is no way in Hell you could get a tarantula near me without my reacting on very primitive level. It doesn't matter that I have an escape route or that I can squish it really easily. I will always always always react in fear.

Your giving your chameleon an escape route was lost on your chameleon. He was reacting as if he was trapped. Take your own logic out of.





Yea, thanks for stating the obvious and unecessarily elaborating. Take it down a notch. I was just sharing really and looking for outward opinions and everyone "else" that replied helped. We are doing much better on our personal relationship now. Try to chill out a little dude.

 

[jajeanpierre]

Yea, thanks for stating the obvious and unecessarily elaborating. Take it down a notch. I was just sharing really and looking for outward opinions and everyone "else" that replied helped. We are doing much better on our personal relationship now. Try to chill out a little dude.

If it was so obvious, why did you need to ask your question in the first place? Nothing about chameleon behavior is obvious to new keepers. The detailed description of a behavior the first step to solving a training problem. It is the standard approach practiced by the top professional animal trainers whether working with killer whales jumping through hoops or giant tortoises willingly standing still for a blood draw.

In your original post, you wrote: "I always slowly present the food slightly under his level so he doesn't feel threatened and I get the same response every time, puffed out throat quick retreat and sometimes hissing." In that one sentence you showed you have very little understanding of chameleon behavior. My detailed description of his behavior showed you what body language to look at to avoid a stressed response in your chameleon.

Poor health and early death are what happens to stressed chameleons. I was trying to help give you some tools to better analyse what was really going on.

 

[wavingsnail]

We need to remember reptiles have the most primitive of brains
Almost all instinctual

I know we're talking chameleons here, but I have to disagree with this generalization.

As someone who has kept numerous varanids and larger reptiles, I have experience first hand many a lizard that not only displays a thought process and rationalization to numerous situations, but differentiation between people and varied emotions.

They're not chimps, but they're definitely a few steps above primitive.

 

[MissLissa]

They're not chimps, but they're definitely a few steps above primitive.

I quite agree. I've trained rattlesnakes to shift from one enclosure to another through an access tunnel on cue, for keeper-safe cage cleaning. I've trained voluntary eye drops with tortoises, even voluntary intracoelomic injections with one chronically ill tegu. One green anaconda I worked with took a deep dislike to a coworker after he had to help restrain her head for a minor medical procedure. She was fine with all other staff members who had participated, but every time he'd appear her tongue would start flickering like mad, and then she'd repetitively strike at the glass as he walked by. We worked out a six month desensitization/positive reinforcement program, and now that same staff member can take her to school programs again (not alone, obviously, she is still an anaconda!). I think reptiles are not given the credit they deserve in the smarts department, much of the time.

More to the point of this thread, I think that it is difficult for humans to remove ourselves from these problematic situations. It would have been easy for my coworker to have said that the anaconda hated him, or had an attitude, especially since anacondas are basically renown for their... ah, difficult... personalities. However, when we deconstructed the situation we found that she was actually displaying escape behaviours prior to striking out. We discovered that my coworker just walking by her enclosure- even though they were separated by several meters- was so far over what she felt comfortable with, that she felt trapped and that she had to strike to defend herself. She was totally justified in her view, though maybe not in my coworkers'! Having a full grown female anaconda strike at you is not for the faint of heart, let me tell you. My coworker obviously had no intention of going near her at the time, but she was telling us the best way she could that she would not tolerate him even within sight of her enclosure, and that she was afraid of him. So, we let her decide what she was okay with, which at first was only another staff member walking by with one of his old shirts... you can imagine how happy we were that we had to haul around his day-old sweaty shirts! Eventually we were able to gradually introduce him back into the workspace background, then closer and closer to her, until we were able to pair his presence with her feedings. It went much faster and smoother from there. This process would have likely been much harder if we'd kept our initial assumption that she "just had an anaconda attitude", as our entire process would have been based on a false and unnecessarily antagonistic assumption. No animal is simply the sum of it's parts: behaviour is both nature and nurture, biological and operant and respondent, traveling inextricably linked together. The only way we can tell what we are actually and truly dealing with is by looking at what the animal actually does in observable terms in a given situation, not what it is or what we think it is.

 

[gotwqqd]

Here's a small tip to aside with hand feeding.
While holding the feeder in your fingertips make sure it's between your line of eyesight and the chameleon.