Common Bearded Dragon Care Mistakes

Hey guys, the reason for this video is we recently went to a string of pet stores and we were checking out the way they house their reptiles. Now one animal that we saw in many pet stores that almost consistently was housed and fed inappropriately was the bearded dragon. Now we were thinking to ourselves you know as a first-time pet owner if you walked into a store and saw the way the bearded dragons were being kept and mimic that at home you're probably going to end up with a sick very unhealthy pet. So in this video we're going to talk about some of the things that we saw in pet stores that you do not want to mimic at home. So the first thing I want to advise you guys to do is when you're going to a pet store make sure you're paying attention to the size of the dragon. Now if you see a dragon that's about the size of your pinky, bearded dragons when their babies are so delicate and fragile you want to make sure you're bringing something home that's well established something that's eating well. If you see a cage full of dragons and they're all babies pick the biggest one not the prettiest one because I learned when I was little that if you pick the best looking one even if it is super tiny and really scrawny you're gonna have better luck with the bigger dragon. So one thing that we saw very commonly in pet stores is bearded dragons that were being housed in a tropical environment. Now if you keep bearded dragons you cannot keep them the same way that you would keep blood pythons or ball pythons or other common popular reptile pets. If you guys have bearded dragons one of these little instruments right here would be your absolute best friend. Bearded dragons come from an arid environment they don't need 99 percent humidity in fact that much humidity will cause bearded dragons to get respiratory infections and the pet stores that we visited we saw water bowls sitting on heat pads we saw even one pet store had their dragons set up with a waterfall inside the enclosure. This is absolutely a no-no and should never be mimicked. Now that being said we want to talk about water bowls in the enclosure. We went to a pet store and all of the dragons set up had water bowls in them and I addressed the issue with the pet store owner and I told him I said those water bowls sitting in a dragon's cage is going to evaporate it's going to raise the humidity level inside the enclosure higher than it needs to be. A better way of watering bearded dragons is to mist them early in the morning with a spray bottle squirting them on the tip of the nose and allowing them to drink the water off the same way they would do in their natural environment they would drink water off of leaves and things like that plants that they find in the wild. However the pet store owner told me he said you're right and I do realize that but there's a problem people who don't know any better came into his pet store saw the bearded dragons did not have water bowls in their cage and filed a complaint against him with the department of agriculture. The department of agriculture also not knowing how to properly house bearded dragons came in and said these dragons are not getting sufficient water and forced the guy to put water bowl in their cages so in some instances it may not be the pet store's ignorance it may be the public's ignorance and pressure put on him by an inspector that also is ignorant of the proper care coming in and forcing them to put water bowls in. Now in our facility we do not keep water bowls in the cages with our bearded dragons whatsoever we have found that it is almost impossible in the part of the country that we live in which is southern Georgia to keep our humidity level low enough if we keep water bowls in our cage and therefore in our part of the country we consider water bowls in a dragon cage an absolute no-no. So two good ways to ensure your dragons have enough hydration enough water to drink one is to spray their greens down prior to giving it to them in the morning time just spray it down real good with water they'll get a lot of water content that way. The other way is to about twice a week soak your dragons in a shallow container of water the water being just deep enough to come up to their elbows. Okay so one of the biggest wastes of money that I've ever seen in my life for dragons is buying food at pet stores well specifically insects that are already dead so sometimes they'll sell you that little plastic bags of frozen crickets or jars of mealworms that are not alive anymore and I have learned that when I feed my dragons insects they like to see the insects moving that's what makes them want to eat it if I give them a jar of some mealworms and they're not moving they're not going to want to eat it but if you give them a jar of mealworms that are moving around and they see them moving around they're going to want to eat it then. Speaking of mealworms somewhere along the line there was an internet rumor that started that you could not feed bearded dragons mealworms now sadly in the reptile community we have this blind sheep mentality that if someone said it on the internet well it must be true without any of experience of our own we oftentimes follow advice that's given to us over the internet and feeding mealworms to bearded dragons is one of those things that is just there's a lot of misinformation out there now I remember many many years back when mealworms were a staple in the diet of captive bearded dragons and then all of a sudden these almost ridiculous rumors started that if you feed mealworms the mealworms could actually eat their way out of the stomach of a bearded dragon now people who actually had bearded dragons and saw just the way they would devour mealworms and chew them to pieces there's no way anything but maybe a zombie mealworm would have ever been alive enough to eat its way out so those things were just absolutely ridiculous and yet people bit into that they begin to believe that now the other thing that people uh believe that's not true is that bearded dragons cannot digest mealworms again that is absolutely false we've tested that theory again and again and again in fact here at coldblood creations we have raised some of our own hold back dragons exclusively on mealworms and superworms and we have found that not only can they eat mealworms but they seem to have a preference for mealworms over some of the other insect prey so guys do not be afraid to use mealworms they're a convenient and easy to keep much easier to keep food source for your dragons than crickets that die off in just a couple of days so don't be afraid to feed your baby dragons mealworms now i'm going to share something with you guys that is going to make your life a whole lot easier now oftentimes pet stores will push like my daughter said earlier even the bags of dead insects which we have found most dragons just ignore all together or they're going to push crickets now something that'll make your life a whole lot easier and we actually do this here at coldblood creations we don't feed crickets hardly at all and the reason for that is because if you go to a pet store you have one baby dragon you have to go to the pet store several times a week to get crickets now most of you guys know you go out you buy 25 crickets by the time you get home half of them are dead you can't keep them long period of time keep them alive they just don't do that well something that'll make your life a whole lot easier is to start your dragons off on worms and keep them on worms as their primary source of protein now mealworms are very very simple to breed super worms are a little bit more difficult but still not impossible for the pet owner to breed at home themselves the nice thing about mealworms is that you can buy cups of them keep them in the refrigerator they'll go into a hibernation state whenever you need to feed your dragon you just take out a handful of worms let them warm back up to room temperature and they'll start moving again now here we breed a lot of our own mealworms as you can see here we have literally thousands and thousands of baby mealworms these guys breed readily in captivity but the focus of this video is not on breeding mealworms or super worms but just on something that'll make your life a lot easier than having to make excessive trips to the pet store every week to buy crickets now as they get a little older we like to switch them over to the super worms here now super worms can readily be bought at discount stores you can order these guys online basically you just want to feed your super worms provide them with some form of moisture sliced potatoes apples or even the insect watering gels and they're very easy to keep they stay alive literally for months and months so if you buy a box of say a thousand at a show they should last you six months as opposed to a box of crickets you would be good to get six days out of those guys so another thing we see at pet stores that we don't recommend is housing two different size dragons together a lot can go wrong when they're not the same size so the first thing that could go wrong is the smaller dragon can end up being food for the larger dragon the second thing that can go wrong is the larger dragon can compete more successfully for the food and the third thing that can happen with different sizes is the larger dragon will often hog the best basking spots so basically all that adds up to your smaller dragon can get very stressed so it's way better if you just keep the two separated so one of the other things that we saw while we were out at these pet stores and we also get asked this a lot of reptile shows is can i house my bearded dragon with my corn snake ball python vermicelli python iguana whatever you name it guys it simply is this there some animals are not meant to cohabitate together the humidity requirements for a ball python or an iguana are much different than the humidity requirements for a bearded dragon now the python being in the cage with the dragon is going to cause the dragon a lot of undue stress and vice versa also the fact that occasionally pythons have been known to kill and eat lizards and you certainly wouldn't want that to happen to your bearded dragon so our advice is do not create an environment that is going to be unhealthy for at least one of those animals sharing that habitat and certainly don't create stress or an opportunity for a free meal all right so guys we want to talk about a couple of things and i hope you guys don't feel like we're beating up on pet stores we're not there are some good pet stores out there that do things correctly although you know we want to share this information to help you have the best experience raising your dragon and if we see something wrong then we feel like it's our duty to cover it now i would advise you if if at all possible you have the opportunity to purchase a dragon purchase it from a breeder the person whose livelihood depends on them taking the best care of the animal that they possibly can after all pet stores are the original flippers they oftentimes do not produce the animals they sell they simply buy them from a breeder and flip them to the public a breeder will be able to tell you a lot of information that the pet stores will not now when you're buying a young bearded dragon sexing them can be sometimes difficult if you have the ability to find out and choose between a male or a female if you're only buying one dragon and you just want a pet we would advise you to buy a male the reason that we advise males over females is simply because you don't have to deal with ovulation and the possibility of eggs binding now it is something controversial some people say it does some people say it don't but we here at coldblood creations do feel like a bearded dragon female is more likely to become egg bound if those eggs are infertile and bearded dragon females can and do ovulate without the presence of a male therefore if she has unfertilized eggs in her because she doesn't have a male to breed with those eggs can get bound up in her and it can end up costing you some expensive vet bills having to have surgery to have those eggs removed so if you want to keep a single pet you're not interested in breeding and if at all possible we would advise that you choose a male now two essential vitamins for bearded dragons is vitamin d3 and vitamin c i want to talk for just a moment about those two vitamins d3 is produced by natural sunlight there's nothing in the world better for your dragons than natural sunlight and you're not going to get the level of vitamin d3 production from a light hung over the cage that you would from natural sunlight so if at all possible get your dragon out a few times a week let them get some natural sunlight however if you live in the southeast like we do be mindful of the fact that it is very humid in the southeast and you don't want to let your dragon breathe that humid air for too long because again their lungs are not designed for that level of humidity and you can end up with a respiratory infection we actually take our dragons out a couple times a week for about 15 minutes at a time it allows them to get natural sunlight for the production of vitamin d3 and it doesn't allow them to be out there long enough that the humidity affects their lungs now speaking of vitamin c unfortunately we have found that none of our dragons like orange juice so we have a difficult time getting vitamin c into our bearded dragons so the way that we have found to compensate for that is that we feed oranges to our insects prior to introducing them to our dragons the orange slices that we use the worms can drink the juice off of those for water and then we immediately take them out put them in the cage so all of the vitamin c from the oranges is introduced in our dragons by gut loading it into the feeder insects first that way our dragons have vitamin c to promote a good healthy immune system and we don't have to try and course them into drinking orange juice so this was actually not supposed to be a part of this video but as we were filming this video I went over and checked one of our incubators and notice that we have baby dragons that are coming out of the egg and looks like we're gonna have some of these guys are really really pretty right out of the egg some beautiful colors some lavender some just really really pretty animals we'll have to get them cleaned up and see what they are we will make these available we'll let you guys know what we have available on our youtube and our facebook channel but it will be quite some time before these will be available we don't like to sell dragons fresh out of the egg we like to get them up get a little size on them get them established pretty well and then we'll make them available so you guys keep an eye out on our facebook page and we'll let you know when these guys are established well enough to find homes so guys I've been keeping and breeding reptiles for over 30 years and the very first pet reptile that I ever bought my daughter here was a bearded dragon she's been breeding dragons now for what you're going on about your fourth or fifth year probably so uh it is something that kids can get into that certainly they can uh they can do very well like she has we will have some dragons available here shortly we do have eggs that have hatched however right now we feel like these dragons are too small to sell to the general public we want to get a little bit more size on them but uh anyway when we have those available we'll let you know and don't forget to give this video a thumbs up and subscribe down below and we'll see you guys in our next video thanks for watching you see a dragon about this size right here just we didn't want to put him in the building