That's a medium-sized one in this pic. And the dumb broad getting bit is... dumb. These things are nasty and have very sharp, dirty teeth.
From Yashin, "How is iguana a lovely pet or not?"
As far as pets are concerned, they suck. They are NOT native species. They infest lawns, walls, canals, roads, yada with holes they dig. If you have iguanas, you do NOT have wild baby duckies, etc. (they cannot outrun, outswim, or hide from iguanas).
The question triggered a memory; I had written a humor article about iguanas for pets for a magazine a coupla decades ago. Went searching, and found it.
“Iguana” Tell You A Story
©Walt C. Snedeker
Bob owned an iguana. Of course, it’s his business if he wanted to have a miniature dinosaur hanging around the place, so I will refrain from airing all the semi-witticisms that spring to mind. Suffice it to say that Bob was happy, and (I presume) so was his dinosaur.
Just having an iguana creeping eerily through the living room would be enough to have my cat, Fuzzy Britches, dissolve into butterscotch-colored mud.
And the Fabled PC need not even be consulted on the matter. Perhaps Bob also was a trifle put off by the intrusion of basilisk eyes at odd times. Or perhaps he realized that iguanas tend to live outdoors when they are wild and free (as opposed to being wild and housebound).
Regardless of the reason, Our Hero embarked on a monumental building project: a condo-guana. It was outdoors. It was enormous. There were rocks and turf, a tree that went right up through the shingled roof which partially covered the wired-in enclosure, and a small pool. He worked steadily and hard. It was almost completed -- almost time for the iguana to see its new digs.
But modern times do intrude. And these modern times include sub-human yahoos that do things like burglary. The bottom line is that Bob’s house was broken into and robbed. Incredibly, the thieves stole his pet iguana!
Bob was desolate. Somewhere out there, he could picture his iguana with a little blindfold and a double set of handcuffs. But no ransom note ever arrived. Bob began to doubt the loyalty of his lizard.
Into this gloomy picture stepped my pal Suzanne (a.k.a. “Suzy”) and her handsome husband Jim. They knew of Bob’s sorry plight, but felt that it was well and truly out of their hands.
And now for, as Paul Harvey says, “The Rest Of The Story”:
They were driving along a busy highway, when a huge iguana scooted right across the road in front of their pickup truck. Jim locked up the brakes, to pile out in pursuit of the beastie. The little horrible got to the edge of the road, and held real still, pretending to be a lizard-shaped fireplug.
But Jim is a clever lad, and was not fooled.
He walked back to the pickup with his evil-looking prize, and climbed in behind the wheel.
Suzy foolishly asked the rash question, “How are you going to drive with that thing in your arms?”
“Hm,” Jim muttered intelligently, arriving at the obvious answer about four hundredths of a second ahead of his bride. He was able to deliver the monster into her arms with just that much lead time ahead of her suddenly dawning surmise.
Confidently, Jim started the truck, as Suzy sat in rigid terror with Godzilla’s grandchild on her lap. It stared at her.
It was real good at staring. Suzy thought she ought to try to get on its good side, if it had one.
So she tried petting it.
Suzy apparently has the ability to put absolutely anything at its ease. And that semi-little monster was no exception. As soon as she began stroking its hideous head, the beast went all soggy and limp. Its eyes rolled back in its head in reptilian bliss. It failed at purring, but it tried.
Jim drove straight to Bob’s house to present him with a replacement for his loss to the iguanappers. As the creature waddled into its brand-new habitat, all three humans commented on how fat and well-fed it appeared.
“Can’t have been lost long, considering how fat it is. Sure looks healthy.”
Bob was beaming at his new prehistoric pet. Everyone shook hands at a happy ending. Almost.
The following day, Bob was on the phone to his philanthropic pals.
“It ain’t fat anymore. Not since it laid those 23 big eggs.”
But the payoff to this story is yet to come. It seems that the superduper habitat that Bob constructed was made with wire mesh that would keep in a full-grown iguana. Not so 23 little baby iguanas. That means that Bob had to move everybody back into his house.
At least he doesn’t have to worry about the burglars coming back and taking all his iguanas -- there’s no way they could ever round them all up. And Bob will never again have to worry about where his next iguana is coming from.
