Most of our exotic pets do a great job eating what we put in front of them, although sometimes they can be a bit stubborn and picky. However, there's also a small group of exotic pets who think it's fun and interesting to eat things that aren't good for them, and in fact aren't actually even food. We've had a couple of episodes with that over the last few months. Scroll down to see what interesting things our patients decided to eat:
Dino the Iguana
Can you tell from this radiograph what Dino ate?
A penny! This penny came out the hard way with surgery. Dino did fine afterwards, and hopefully has found a better place to hide his money in the future.
Orion the Fennec Fox
This little fox ate what appears to be five rubber wrist bands!
These definitely were not going to pass all the way out, so we took these out the hard way, too. Orion is doing just fine now.
Beardy, the Bearded Dragon and his lunch: the rubber lizard
This bearded dragon was much luckier. We were't even sure the rubber lizard was still inside, as the owner knew it was missing, but weren't 100% sure Beardy had swallowed it. We tried to find it with X-rays and the endoscope, but could not. It was so soft we couldn't actually feel it in Beardy's abdomen. Just when we were trying to decide what to do, it magically reappeared in the morning! Who knows if it came out the front way or the back way.