Why are Chameleons Tricky Pets?

05-03-24 00 / episode: 378

Why are Chameleons Tricky Pets? I love chameleons. But even if you love them, they are still tricky pets. I'm going to tell you why chameleons are so tricky to keep. First we have to look at the cages. I'll tell you two features of cages that are necessary and if you don’t have them, Your chameleon could be in trouble. Then we'll talk about chameleon friends and why you want to have only one chameleon. Then I’m gonna talk about some of their behaviours that make them tricky to keep. Hi and welcome to the Les Perras podcast episode number 378. Today I’m talking about why chameleons are so tricky to keep.

The Problem with Fresh Air

The first trick is getting the fresh air just right for your pet chameleon. Keeping a cage well ventilated for just about any pet that needs a cage is a really good idea - except for chameleons. What's the big deal? Well, you need the ventilation because these animals need to get fresh air. You and your chameleon will feel nothing but grief If you put them inside an unventilated cage, they could die from that. They need a high humidity and high moisture environment. And it has to be constant. It can't be changing, or you're gonna stress your chameleon. Stress is very bad for chameleons. That spells grief for you and your chameleon So you need to get a special cage with special ventilation techniques to keep it warm and moist for your buddy. Otherwise it’s gonna feel stress. And speaking of stress, let's take a look at another stressor for these tricky animals.

Special Cage Size

Once you get it warm and moist, you have to make it safe for your chameleon buddy. They love to climb trees. It makes them feel safe. If they're not up high in the tree, they're gonna feel a lot of stress. If you want to keep a chameleon as a pet, you need to make a special cage that's tall so that it can have branches and leaves up high to crawl on. And you shouldn't put the cage on the floor, because, even though it's up on a branch, it’s still kind of low down. Now before I talk about some quirky behaviour of Chameleons, Let’s talk about their social life a bit.

Social Life

To introduce chameleon social life, let me tell you a story. I found a guy who got a chameleon as a pet. Then somebody in his family gave him another chameleon pet as a gift. At first he was really happy. He thought this was cool. He put them in the cage. He checked the cage: Warm: check Humid: check High: check But his chameleons were definitely very unhappy. They were greyish. There were a few times when he even saw them fighting with each other. These guys were just bad neighbours, and they felt stress being in the same cage together. That's how chameleons are. They're like lone wolves. They don't want friends, and they don't want close neighbours. Don't put them together in the same cage. It's a bad idea.

Don’t Force it

There was another guy on the Internet who wrote about some of his experiences with keeping a chameleon as a pet. He said that when he picked up the chameleon it didn't move. He said at the beginning he thought that was a happy chameleon. In his mind, it was just content to sit on his hand. Finally he discovered that if chameleons don't move at all, It's a bad sign. It means they are feeling stressed. That's one way chameleons respond to stress. They stay really still. If you pick up your chameleon and it stays really still, then you know that it's not happy, it's feeling stressed. So pick it for just a little bit of time each day, until it gets used to you.