The honest answer for a big predator in a family home
A savannah monitor can live in a home with other kinds of pets, but 'happily' depends entirely on barriers, because in this pairing the monitor is rarely the one in danger. A savannah monitor grows into a heavy, muscular lizard with strong jaws, digging claws, and a predator's reflexes, and it reads the world through scent and movement: a kitten, a small dog, a rabbit, or a bird is not a housemate to this animal - it is potential prey, and no amount of familiarity changes that reading. Cats and dogs are equally a risk in return during the monitor's juvenile months, when a dog's playful grab can kill it. This is a workable household only for people who treat separation as permanent architecture, not a phase.
Space and locks are the whole strategy
An adult savannah monitor needs an enclosure measured like a small room, with deep substrate for burrowing, a serious basking site, and doors that lock against a lizard strong enough to push, pry, and dig at seams for hours. Build or buy that security before the monitor outgrows the cute stage, and site it in a room the other pets do not enter at all - not a living room tank the cat strolls past, and never a free-roam arrangement in a shared space. Feeding and cleaning sessions run with the door shut and the dog and cat elsewhere in the house, every time, because the one lapse in a hundred is the one that gets remembered. A household with a member who will prop the door open 'just for a second' is a household that should not keep this lizard alongside pets.
Temperament, handling, and who does it
A well-raised savannah monitor can become tolerant of its keeper's handling, but tolerant is a relationship with one or two known people, built slowly through tong-feeding and calm, predictable contact. It does not extend to visitors, children, or the neighbor's dog, and a monitor that feels cornered will bite, claw, and whip its tail with real force. Handling happens inside the monitor's room, by the experienced keeper, with other pets excluded; the lizard is never carried through the house for show, never set down in a garden where the dog patrols, and never left on the floor with a cat in the building's same space. If the household wants a lizard the children can hold and the dog can ignore, smaller species do that job - the monitor's size and strength are precisely its appeal and its limit.
Daily life for the other pets in a monitor's house
For the cats and dogs, a monitor household should feel entirely ordinary, and that ordinariness is the goal. Their routines, feeding places, and sleeping spots stay far from the reptile room, and the monitor's food - rodents, eggs, and large insects - is stored frozen and prepared away from the other pets' feeding areas so scavenging dogs never learn to haunt the wrong door. The smells and sounds of the monitor room will interest a cat; a closed, latched door that never becomes a game is the entire answer. Guests need the same briefing as family: the room stays shut, the lizard is not a photo stop, and no one opens the enclosure but the keeper.
Reading a monitor, and knowing the limits
A savannah monitor that basks openly, burrows daily, explores its enclosure, and takes food eagerly from tongs is a monitor whose household arrangements suit it. One that gapes and hisses at every approach long past the settling-in period, refuses food for weeks, or injures itself against the doors is telling you its space, temperatures, or sense of security is wrong, and husbandry changes come before more handling. Any bite to a person or contact incident with another pet needs prompt medical or veterinary attention - monitor bites are deep, dirty wounds. Keeping the access rules, feeding log, and enclosure checks written on the monitor's KinsLe profile through Family Sharing makes sure the whole household protects both sides of this particular fence.