How To Pick Up and Carry A Chameleon

Note the difference in color and gular displays between the WC and the CB.

Picking Up The WC Melleri

I always wear disposable gloves when I have to touch a WC chameleon in quarantine. This specimen is Kinah, at a little over 60 days in captivity. First, I approach so "she" can see me coming. She is still not sure that I don't eat chameleons, so she shows a bluff display. Her eye is trained on the gloved hand.

I reach around her, blocking a retreat to the back of the enclosure, and watch her for the telltale shift of weight that would allow her to whip her head sideways for a bite. If the chameleon were to drop or run to a far corner, I would use a leaf or long wisp of grass to tickle the cham back to the front of the enclosure. This is far less stressful than climbing into the cage and grabbing it. Every move is fluid and slow, to avoid upsetting her further. I spread my fingers and position them to where her feet can get a grip. With my loose fingers, I lightly brush her toes until she grabs the fingers. I do not put pressure on her torso, I only have contact with her feet.

When she has a full grip of my hand, I slowly lift her out of the enclosure and hold her off to the side, above my line of vision. From this point on, I can examine her, or wrap her in a soft towel to administer medication.

Picking Up The Tame Captive Bred Melleri

I wash my hands before and after I handle or feed my chameleons, for their health and my own. Because these animals are clean, and their cage is clean, I do not have to use gloves when handling the smaller ones. This is Muenda, and she has known me since she hatched on 1/30/2005. She comes over when I open the cage, and climbs right onto my hand when I reach it out to her.

A close-up of how to place fingers so the feet can grasp. A tame cham will help itself to your fingers... in a nice way.

I lift the cham up and outwards in a slow arc. She doesn't leave her cage often, and is checking out the view, wearing an excited color (and she's about to shed). She frees her tail and curls it, as I ease her out of the cage. A tame and secure melleri will be indifferent to handling.

Handling and Taming Melleri

Newly acquired stressy female in 2001 /photo courtesy K. Francis
The same female, now relaxed on the glove, 4 years later /photo K. Francis	This is why we wear gloves /photo K. Francis

 Chameleons like to spend all of their time doing their own thing. To speak generally, they do not like being handled or made to do what a human asks. When it comes to physical examination, moving from enclosure to enclosure, medicating, and introduction for breeding, the chameleon has to be touched. Sudden episodes of handling can be stressful to the unaccustomed melleri. With practice, you can tame your melleri (and many other species). Here is one keeper’s method for low-stress impact taming and handling techniques.

 Keepers that have worked with other animal species, such as dogs, cats, horses, and birds, may have heard of natural training techniques. To a degree, this approach is applicable to chameleons. The aim is to keep stress to a minimum, in fact, so much so that the chameleon thinks that what you ask of him was his own idea in the first place. The animal learns to associate the keeper with pleasant experiences. They learn no harm comes from your hands, so trust grows. Chameleons are an odd mix of animal traits: they are both predator and prey, have pecking orders, communicate outside the range of human hearing (infrasonic vibration), are visually-oriented, and can feel both comfort and pain. Knowing this, you can wrangle your melleri with minimal stress or resistance.

 As prey animals, chameleons avoid long-term full eye contact. The human face, with both eyes pointing forward, may appear to the chameleon as a predator, like a larger chameleon, with both eyes focused for a tongue strike. Small chameleons can be prey for larger ones, and the chameleon’s brain could be wired to run and hide when it sees a face with binocular vision. Avoid looking your chameleon in the eyes; instead, look down or away from the animal. If you hold the melleri on your hand, hold your hand up so the melleri’s face is above your line of vision. Melleri in particular are very sensitive to the faces of their keepers. Some melleri have been known to display aggressively at their long-term keeper when articles of clothing are altered. Eyeglasses, hats, hair color, clothing color are recognized as the visual sum of the keeper. If one element of attire is changed, some particularly sensitive melleri will display at the human they assume is a stranger (and therefore, a threat to their territory). This sensitivity points out the intricacy of their intraspecific visual signals. With time and acclimation, your melleri will accept your scary eyes and look deeply into them from a perch at your level. This is useful because melleri eyes show a lot of their inner activity. Stressed, frightened, or angry melleri will squint their eye openings. A wide-open, round eye opening is more confident, taking in its surroundings. The pupil within dilates and contracts as the animal focuses on objects around. A relaxed chameleon will casually rotate its turrets independently, constantly observing its environment, with robotic movement. When your melleri is calm enough to take its eyes off you and look around instead, you have earned more of its trust.

 Cater to your chameleon’s ego. Let it believe it is at the top of the pecking order by allowing it to perch above your head. Make the cage tall so that the animal can look out over the tops of human heads. Chameleons at the tops of trees are the dominant animals in the colony. Lower perches are for chameleons with uncertain lives. While it is dangerous to give a dog such an upper hand in your relationship, with a chameleon, it doesn’t translate to aggressive behaviors against the keeper. It has the opposite effect, it makes the chameleon more stable emotionally and more likely to view its keeper in a positive light.

 Chameleons have no external ears, but they still can pick up vibrations with their entire bodies. They communicate via infrasonic frequencies. You might feel this buzzing or rumbling when the chameleon perches on your hand. When you work with your melleri, turn off the stereo and avoid the deep noise of traffic and industry. To reward your chameleon for good behavior, be quiet. It can’t hear you say “Good boy!” and the silence is more of a treat. Your body vibrates with your speech and this can make a chameleon uneasy.

 This brings us to the reward system. Chameleons take great pleasure from two things: eating and basking. The ways to a chameleon’s heart are through its stomach and its skin. If you have to perform a task that wild chameleons hate, like oral medication, it is best to do it where the animal is perched in its tree. If it hides or fights you, sit down with your chameleon near a sunny window. Use a towel (see Your Melleri’s First Vet Visit) to restrain your animal, give the dose, and quickly open up the towel so that the animal’s skin is in full sunlight. If you can, set it on the floor or your lap in a patch of sun. The chameleon will most likely forget everything that just occurred and settle to bask on the towel. You have just stopped stress dead in its tracks, the chameleon now associates the inanimate towel with any former discomfort, and next time, the task will be much easier. After you have mastered the first step, you can place the animal in the sun on the towel, and attempt dosing without restraint. Some chameleons get so involved in basking that they will swallow and get it over with rather than change their comfortable position. Eventually, the chameleon learns to accept medication right where it perches in its territory.

 Food rewards work well. A small, shallow bowl of crickets (without hind legs) is a handy way to keep rewards at the ready. This is ideal for teaching a chameleon to walk onto you from its cage. It is easy to lure your chameleon to the door with a twitching bug, then onto your hand with the next, all the while holding subsequent bugs just out of tongue reach. The chameleon will advance onto you to reach the next bug. The chameleon associates your presence with the pleasure of eating and the excitement of hunting. Food rewards are a good idea after oral medication to help wash down the suspension and to reinforce the chameleon’s compliant behavior.