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The Story of Sissy |
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Overseeing the veterinarian fill our her chart, 12-year-old Sissy measured four feet long and weighed in at seven pounds. Though rare, green iguanas can live up to 20 years in captivity with expert care.
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Oregon may be a long way from her native southern Mexico, but Sissy thinks it’s the next best place to live. She lives with Ann Hussey in an apartment in her own giant two story cage. She sleeps all night and is awake all day, she has her own daytime place in a sun-lit window and her own UV light for times when the sunny window is too hot to be in or too cold. She lounges on a heating pad, eats and drinks only what she should and she sees her veterinarian when she needs to. Her family loves her. "Sissy is calm, quiet and beautiful," Ann says of her prized pet. "I keep her in her cage or in the window most of the time because she's clumsy and knocks stuff over with her tail. She likes to be the highest thing in the room too, so more than once I've found her hanging over the sides of curtain rod and had to peel her off and bring her back down. Given even the slightest opportunity she would be out the door. Sissy loves to travel.”
Sissy entered the Hussey household a year after Ann’s oldest son Andrew went off to college and bought himself an iguana.
“I walked by pet shop, saw the iguanas and on an impulse, I bought Sissy,” Andrew said. “She was a year old and about the length of an egg carton – maybe a little longer with the tail.
“One of my roommates was scared of her and though the other one liked to keep the door open so she kept getting out. When that happened we would all scour the yard and usually ended up finding her in a tree and have to climb up to get her. I still love iguanas because they are not frantic like a bird or a dog or a rabbit. However, the responsibility is more like having a child. I don’t think people stop and think of the responsibility they have to take when they get one. It is definitely an adult pet and you have to have enough money to take the right kind of care of it. I ended up giving it to Mom. If I walked by a pet shop today? I would be content to just buy dog food for my brother’s dog.”
As amazing as it sounds, Sissy is cage toilet-trained. When Ann first got her, she put a pan of water in her cage and would be dismayed because she went to the bathroom in it. Then she learned that in the wild they sit on a branch over water to relieve themselves, so now instead of trying to make it a place for her to drink, she makes sure she puts lots of moisture in her food.
She eats dark leafy green vegetables – things like collard, mustard, turnip tops, Kale and broccoli and she likes bananas. Ann supplements her diet with a canned iguana food that is a blend of vegetables and she knows not ever to feed her dog food or anything else you would feed a cat or dog. She also knows that you have to be very careful about which websites you read or who you talk to because there is a lot of bad information out there.
Of course Sissy is an exception to other iguanas, because she loves traveling around rural Oregon and talking about it so be sure to read her blog.
Jan Jackson
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