Why the price itself is the first welfare clue
A baby green iguana can carry a strikingly low price in the shop and still become costly to keep properly. Within a few years that hatchling, small enough to run along your forearm, becomes an animal well over a metre and a half long, needing a room-sized enclosure, serious heating and ultraviolet lighting, and daily fresh food, with a lifespan that can run to fifteen or twenty years. A very low price often signals how the animal was produced and why the shop wants it gone: many cheap babies are wild-caught or farmed in crowded conditions overseas, arrive stressed and parasite-laden, and are sold before the costs of their care land on anyone. The questions below are how you find out which kind of cheap this is — a healthy surplus from a decent breeder, or a problem being transferred to you.
Questions about origin and time in the shop
Ask directly: is this iguana captive-bred, farmed or wild-caught, and can the shop say where it came from? Ask how long this individual has been in the shop and whether it is feeding independently. A good seller answers plainly and often has a hatch date or at least an arrival date. Vagueness here matters, because a wild-caught baby that has barely fed since import is a fragile animal, however bright it looks under the shop lights. Look at the animal while you talk: it should be alert, with clear eyes, a reasonably filled-out tail base and limbs, no black mite specks moving around the eyes or skin folds, no crusting at the mouth, and no toes missing or swollen. A lethargic baby that does not react to your hand near the glass is telling you something the price tag will not.
Questions about feeding and the home they expect you to provide
Ask what the baby is being fed, and how often. The right answer centres on leafy greens — things like collard, mustard and dandelion greens — offered daily, not a bowl of lettuce or a diet of protein-heavy foods that damage kidneys over time. Then ask the question that separates honest shops from careless ones: what will this iguana need as an adult? A seller who describes a large custom or room-sized enclosure with strong UVB lighting and a basking spot is being straight with you. A seller who says a medium tank will do fine for years is either uninformed or hoping you will not find out until the animal is too big to return. Ask, too, what heating and lighting they are sending you home with today, and what their policy is if the animal falls ill in the first weeks or outgrows your space.
Decide with the adult animal in the room
Before you pay, run one final check on yourself rather than the iguana: picture the adult, at full size, in your home, eating a shopping bag of greens a week, for the next two decades. If that picture works, and the shop's answers were specific and confident, a cheap baby can be a perfectly good start. If any answer was evasive, or the adult picture makes you hesitate, the welfare-friendly decision is to walk away — an iguana bought on pity from a bad setup usually funds the next shipment of the same. If the shop's answers leave gaps, put a follow-up question to KinsLe's Kimmy; she answers using the KinsLe Answers library.