Feeding & Nutrition

Reptiles are not pets that love you back, and I knew that going in. The leopard gecko arrived in a plastic tub from a colleague who was moving abroad, and for two weeks he sat under his heat lamp and looked at the wall while I worried he was dying of a sadness I could not name.

The breeder forums said powdered diet, the kind you mix with water into a paste and smear on a ledge. I bought the good brand, the one with the vitamin D and the cricket meal, and he turned his face away from it like a toddler presented with broccoli. I tried three brands. He refused all three with the same flat indifference.

Live insects were the obvious answer, but I am not a person who wants crickets in the house, and the idea of a tub of them chirping in my spare room kept me up at night. So I kept mixing paste and kept failing, and the gecko kept his ribs showing in a way that made me uncomfortable to look at.

Then, by accident, I smeared a little honey on the rim of the dish before I added the paste. Not much, a drip, the amount you would put on a sore throat. He licked the rim. He came back. Within a day he was eating the paste off the honey-slick edge, and within a week he would wait by the ledge at the time I usually came with the bowl.

I am not proud of the honey trick, because geckos do not need sugar and I am aware I trained him with a treat the way you would train a dog. But he gained weight, his tail filled out from a thin whip to something rounded, and the vet who saw him said he looked like a different animal than the one described on the phone.

Now I use honey maybe once a fortnight, just to remind him the paste is worth the trouble, and the rest of the time he eats it plain because the habit stuck. The live crickets never came into the house, which means I sleep, and the gecko eats, and both of us got what we needed without either of us giving up the thing we feared.

The lesson, if there is one, is that refusal is not always dislike. Sometimes an animal just needs a reason to try something once, and a single drip of something familiar is enough to open the door. I had been treating him like a machine that needed the right fuel, when he was a small, cautious creature deciding whether the world was safe to taste.

He still looks at the wall sometimes. That is just a gecko being a gecko. But he looks at the honey dish first, and that, to me, counts as progress worth noting.

The colleague who handed him over had kept him for eight years and warned me, kindly, that he was set in his ways and that the move would likely set him back. She was right about the set ways. She was wrong that there was nothing to be done, though it took me longer than I like to admit to find the thing that worked.

His tank sits by the window where the morning light falls, and I learned to read his mood in the colour of his skin, which shifts with temperature and temper in ways the care sheet never mentioned. A pale gecko is a cold gecko, and a cold gecko will not eat, and a gecko that will not eat becomes the thing you lie awake worrying about.

The honey is a cheat, and I know it, but it is a small one. A drip, once a fortnight, smeared where he will find it, and the rest is the paste he now eats without the bribe. I have weaned him the way you wean anything stubborn, slowly, and the habit outlasted the treat, which is the part that matters.

He has lived with me longer than the colleague lived abroad, and the wall he used to stare at now has a honey dish near it, and a small, rounded tail, and a gecko who finally decided the world was safe to taste. I still would not keep crickets. Some boundaries are mine to keep.

I have stopped explaining the honey to people who ask, because the explanation always sounds like an excuse for a lapse in discipline, and the truth is quieter than that. The gecko eats, he is healthy, the tank is calm, and the drip is a small kindness I extend because I can, not because the rule book allows it.

Some mornings he ignores the dish entirely and basks with his eyes shut, and those mornings I do not push him, because a creature that has learned the food will wait is a creature that trusts the waiting, and trust was the whole thing we were building from the start, long before the honey ever touched the rim.