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Link hasn't really ever gone through the "moody puberty" thing either. The closest thing that I can think of, is when he was just under a year, and I was starting taking him outside for walks. He got a little spooked a couple of times, gaped at me a lot when I tried to pick him up (only when we were outside) and thrashed a lot, but this was very brief. I got bit a little once on the hand after I picked him up, but I attribute that to him being out and about for a few hours with me, and me ignoring his "I'm irritated and scared, and want to be somewhere familiar now!" body language. The only other time I got bit was a little before that when I was attempting to hand-feed him some meat. He got my entire finger plus the meat in his mouth, and seemed as startled as I was about him getting ahold of my finger. He now generally refuses to eat from my fingers, and will only eat from my hand if he's eating something from my palm.


I'm going to guess the moodiness of the tegu depends on a number of factors: how often they're handled, where they're being handled, if there is food involved, and how socialized they are in general. When he was a baby I worked to socialize him with cats, dogs, and everyone on the street who wanted to check him out. I've never once seen him get possessive of anything (except when he was chewing on things because he was teething) I've only ever had one tegu so far, so my current opinion is definitely biased, but I have to wonder how much of this puberty aggression is just due to not socializing the animals with everyone at a young age, not understanding body language, and not messing around enough in their enclosure to the point that they see it as their "territory" that they have to defend. It could be that after a year and a half everyone finally just adapts to each other and the tegu is like "whatever" and gets on with life if you go into his cage, or pick him up, etc.


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