Richard Mikita, age l0, of santa Maria, Calif. for his question;
What should I feed a pet horned toad?
The so called horned toad is a handsome fellow in an ugly sort of way. He is smart enough to learn to know you and to look for feeding time. His needs are quite simple, he is easy to tend and he is a fascinating pet.
We call him the horned toad because he looks like a toad adorned with spikes and prickly fringes. Actually, he is a lizard just the right size to sit in the palm. of your hand. He has more than a dozen different cousins living in North and Central America, and all of them live their entire lives on and in the ground. They live on the deserts and the prairies, on the plateaus and in the mountains, and their mottled skins tend to blend with their different backgrounds.
Your pet horned lizard needs the kind of life he enjoyed in the wild. In captivity, his home should be a glass walled terrarium with a sandy floor and perhaps a few flat stones for sun bathing. Being a lizard, he loves to toast himself in the sun and he should be given a few hours of warm sunshine every day. His feeding habits change with the weather and he often refuses to dine when the temperature drops below 70 degrees.
He is by nature a meat eater and he swallows his food alive and kicking. His favorite food is ants but beetles and other insects also are on his menu. He likes insect larvae of all kinds and one captive horned lizard ate a small garter snake.
Though ants are his favorite food in the wild, he may refuse to eat them in captivity. It would be troublesome to gather all his groceries from the deserts and prairies. But many suitable items can be found in the garden and others can be bought in a pet store. If you know where there is an ants' nest, gather up a group of the grown ants and some of their larvae. He may flick out his long tongue and swallow them one by one. He certainly will enjoy a feast of worms and be sure to vary his diet with a few beetles. He eats no vegetables and always remember that he eats his meat alive and kicking.
If he refuses to eat, he may be waiting for warmer weather or he may not be hungry. A horned lizard often fasts for more than a week; so allow him no more than l5 minutes to finish his meal and be surf to remove the left over groceries from his terrarium.
It is fascinating to watch the horned lizard dine. He sees perhaps an ant and moves his eyes to watch it scuttle through the sand. Then he moves up close and flashes out his tongue. This happens so fast that the bug seems to disappear. But the next moment your pet gulps down a swallow and you know that he popped the little fellow into his mouth.