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I don't normally do this kind of thing and I'm highly unlikely to try it again, but it just kind of happened so I thought I'd share the
experience.
A few nights ago I was getting ready to feed Captain 20, a sub-adult male chondro of mine. I opened his tub and saw something unusual: he was half inside his
water dish, his head was elevated above the dish, his mouth was slightly ajar, and a piece of cypress bark plus something just thicker than a hair was sticking
out the side of his mouth. The bark was pretty straightforward (why he was munching on it remains a mystery), but the hairlike thing was an enigma. Was it a
sliver of bark? Was it the leg of some insect he'd eaten? I called for my wife to come down to the reptile room for a second set of eyes.
Together we opened his mouth and removed the bark, but the other thing had gone down the hatch and was irretrievable. Thoughts of impaction and prolapse entered my mind, my biggest fear being that he had swallowed bark. But the Captain seemed to be feeling pretty lively and after I let go of his head, he started crawling all over me.
That's when I looked over at the bucket and saw the little rat waiting to be fed to him, and the forceps next to the bucket. Realizing that I was at
that precise moment his perch, I thought, Hmm, why not? So I fed him as he hung from my arm.
My wife shot the photograph after chastising me for not letting her know what I was about to do so she could catch it on video. Then I returned Captain 20
back to the perch in his tub simply by unwrapping it from my arm and placing it on his perch, whereupon he grabbed hold of it himself. He never missed a beat.
I suspect I could have held him for the duration of the entire feeding process, but I had other animals to feed.
