Friday, September 12, 2008
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A Blog designed for discussion of topics related to, but not limited to, Circus, Zoos, Animal Training, and Animal Welfare/Husbandry. Sometimes opening up the dialog is the best starting point of all. And if for nothing else when people who agree and don't agree, get together and start discussing it, it will open up a lot of peoples minds. Debate and discussion even amongst themselves opens a window where there wasn't one before.
1 comment:
Varanus indicus was called an Indian Monitor mostly in the US. In Europe they called it the Bengal Monitor, and these days they are almost universally called Mangrove Monitors. Countless tens of thousands went through the pet market before India shut down export in the late 1970's. Varanids have a lot in common with large predators. They're very smart, for reptiles, learn from their mistakes and see pretty much everything as meat. A lot of hobbyists keep Mangrove Monitors today, because they're easy to reproduce and not as large and potentially dangerous as big Nile Monitors, or the big Water Monitors that get to be three meters long and sometimes stalk and attack when you turn your back. When I was in school I worked for a guy who had studied Mangrove Monitors in Indian before he went to Indonesia to observe Komodos and write a book. He decide that if Indian Monitors were half the size of tigers they'd have been the dominant predator in the subcontinent. Then he went to a place where the monitors really were the size of tigers and really were the dominant predator and he reckoned humans got really lucky that "dragons" were restricted to a small island group. The first time I saw the "raptors" in the Jurassic Park movie I remember thinking, bipedal monitor lizards...
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