Intriguing recipes abound on the interwebz. We are searching for something good for the crockpot, but reptilian repasts are not presently in the offing.

Take for example this one. The full recipe is here.

Iguana in Curry Sauce

Iguana is considered a delicacy, and you might find someone in your yard during dry season trying to catch one that just ran across the street. Okay, we’ve never tried it, but I do have a recipe for it! Maybe we’ll try it someday…

1 Iguana
5 Tbsp. Lemon juice
1 Tbsp. Curry powder
3 Cloves garlic, crushed
1 onion, chopped
Leaves from 1 stalk celery, chopped
1 small hot pepper, chopped fine
2 chicken bouillon cubes or 2 tsp. bouillon powder
2 Tbsp. Vegetable oil
2 tomatoes, chopped
salt and pepper

Cleaning the Iguana

Hang the iguana by the head. Cut off the feet and the crest on the back.

No, that’s not the whole thing. Go to the full recipe. We suggest getting a couple of Cornish game hens to practice upon. After that garlic and hot pepper and bouillon cubes, the taste can’t be much different.

Noted with interest, from Eco-Index® blog in 2013. No recent information available about whether this iguana preserve has worked out. There are several problems . . .

Habitat degradation is common in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and a nation that’s been nearly completely deforested.  What little forestland that remains continues to be cut down for charcoal, the country’s primary source of energy.  According to [Massani] Accimé, after an access road to Anse-a-Pitres was built in 2011, charcoal production became a significant source of income for local residents, who also hunt Ricord’s iguanas for their meat and eggs. Cyclura species only reproduce once a year by laying 14-20 eggs in one nest, so egg poaching has a devastating effect on the population.

Hispaniola

“People in Anse-a-Pitres don’t have a wildlife conservation ethos. They just don’t see animals that way. To make matters worse, there’s also a fair amount of herpetophobia in Haiti,” Accimé explains. “A lot of our work involves trying to foster a different attitude and making people aware of the role of these animals in their environment.”

Iguanas can help sustain plant diversity because their turds help nourish valuable seeds:

Eggs

As the largest endemic herbivore on Hispaniola, Ricord’s are of great ecological importance to the region. They play a vital role in dispersing plant seeds—in fact, an IUCN study found that seeds that had passed through the alimentary tract of rock iguanas ended up growing more quickly and into bigger mature plants than seeds that had not.

The slow-news tale of chilly iguanas falling from trees has been recurring for some years. In 2014 the NYTimes ran this “personal lives” essay by Anne Doten, “The Iguana in the Bathtub.”

The point to the exercise is that they tried to revive an iguana, but killed it instead. Which is a shame, because they even used a stethoscope.

Together we tiptoed toward the tub and peered inside the box. The iguana was still immobile, and its skin was pale, almost gray instead of green. The thing was dead. It was definitely dead.

John bent down and lifted the iguana’s cardboard coffin. Still in my pajamas, I slipped on a pair of shoes and opened the front door. Our funeral procession to the Dumpster was short and somber. I held the lid open, and John dropped in the box. The thud reverberated inside the steel tomb.

We stared at the Dumpster for a few moments. “I thought I could save it,” John said.

Search engines will find you many online sites that sell iguana meat. Whole frozen iguanas, iguana hot dogs, you name it.

But when you try to visit the page for one of these exotic-meat provenders, you usually find it’s been down since around 1959. Why do they tease us so?

It’s the same deal with iguana meat in the news. So often we read, especially in the gutter press, that some Mexican countries hope to export iguana meat for hard currency.

In Nicaragua they were supposedly urging the populace to eat iguanas to ease the drought. (See cut from the Guardian.)

Puerto Rico was proposing to export iguanas in 2012, though it’s not clear what became of the plan. There are more iguanas than yoomans on the tropical isle, and since the two species cannot interbreed, the government wanted to throw the green critters out, or export them for meat.

From the Desert News in 2012:

The island’s government is announcing plans to kill as many of the reptiles as possible and export their meat in hopes of eradicating an imported species that has long vexed residents and entertained tourists.

The U.S. Caribbean territory has roughly 4 million iguanas, which is a little more than the island’s human population, according to Daniel Galan Kercado, secretary of the Department of Natural Resources.

“This is a very big problem. We have to attack it,” he said in an interview Friday. “It has impacted structures, the economy, crops and the ecosystem.”

Puerto Rico has long struggled to eradicate the bright green reptiles that can grow up to 6 feet (1.8 meters) long and have a life span of some 20 years. Iguanas are considered an endangered species throughout most of Latin America, but Puerto Rico is overrun with them, in part because they breed so quickly and have few natural predators.

The reptiles were first seen in the wild in Puerto Rico in the 1970s when owners began to release them, and their numbers have since exploded. They have been blamed for taking over airport runways, burrowing under buildings and destroying foundations, and causing blackouts by building nests near the warmth of electric plants.

But first, dreamy-eyed iguana tycoons need to persuade us to eat the fecund lizards.

This may be a hard slog. Iguana has never even found a foothold in oriental cuisine . . . and those people eat practically anything!

By Fred Milner, DVM

Q. My husband and I own many animals, including several reptiles. We have a rare Komodo dragon, a sulcata tortoise, a pair of mated grass snakes, a 5-year-old alligator who is very gentle and watches The Late Show with us, and a 2-year-old green iguana named Ned. Ned usually has the run of the house, since he is very good at keeping the bugs down. Lately he’s taken to sleeping in the baby’s crib, at least when Baby is there. I think he likes the body heat!

Is this okay, you think? When Baby wakes up and finds Ned sitting on his belly (that is, Baby’s belly) and looking at him, he is delighted and treats him as one would a favorite toy. Sometimes when Baby is hungry and wants his bottle, he sucks on part of Ned instead. What are your thoughts on this, healthiness-wise?

Dr. Milner

A. I do not think there is much danger of your child catching disease from close oral contact with a clean iguana. My concern would be more about the health of the lizard. Sooner or later Baby will be teething, if he is not already, and as the teeth sharpen he will be liable to bite Ned’s head off. I have never heard of this happening to an iguana, although when my younger brother was eighteen months old he chewed the head off a milk snake.

I suggest you get one of those realistic-looking artificial iguanas to keep Baby company, at least until he is old enough to know that Ned is more than friendly food.