Kurt Hilberth first discovered the reptile thrashing around in the toilet when he went to the bathroom on July 24 at his house in Hollywood to brush his teeth.
After encouragement from his family, Hilberth wore protective gloves and went to fish the beast out of the toilet, but it kept swimming back down so it couldn’t be caught.
Three days later, he nearly caught it.
“I was able to grab him by his back legs and part of the tail. I was pulling out [and] he was pulling in. The tail was going back and forth. Water was flying everywhere. It was total chaos inside this small bathroom,” Hilberth told WFOR, a local news channel. “Unfortunately, I was left with merely a handful of tail.”
The lizard swam back down the toilet, out of reach, after its tail broke off in Hilberth’s hand, which was still wriggling when he moved it outside. He then decided it was time to call the experts to remove the reptile.
Trapper Harold Rondan from Iguana Lifestyles placed a stick in the toilet. He was later able to grab the creature and remove it, after it crawled onto the stick.
Hilberth believes the lizard crawled into his toilet through the sewage vent stack on his house roof, so he fastened metal mesh to it to prevent it from happening again.
According to the Invasive Species Compendium (ISC), the black spiny-tailed iguana can be aggressive and “difficult.” They are typically found in hot dry areas and are a native species of Mexico and Central America, but some are in Florida. The ISC considers them a pest, as they consume valuable horticultural plants, invade dwellings, and threaten endangered native species through predation and usurpation of burrows.
Newsweek has contacted Hilberth for more comment.
Iguanas are popular animals to illegally smuggle. A man who reportedly smuggled nearly two dozen of the lizards from Florida and attempted to sell the duct-taped reptiles for $10 each was arrested on July 5.
Another man from Florida stood trial in June on a felony animal cruelty charge for beating an iguana to death because it bit him on the arm. PJ Nilaja Patterson, 43, said the iguana attacked him, biting him on the arm, and he had used deadly force in retaliation.
