#bearded dragon

Something I desperately need pet owners to understand is that overfeeding is not love and overfeeding to the point of morbid obesity is just as negligent and detrimental to pets as underfeeding to the point of emaciation. The bearded dragon pictured here was surrendered many years ago due to lethargy, which the owner thought might be due to eggbinding. The owner could not afford to have the animal seen by a vet and at least knew that the right thing to do was to surrender her, but both her condition and her greatly curtailed lifespan (even after receiving better care) could have been avoided if proper husbandry conditions were provided. She was not eggbound; she was dying of both obesity and malnutrition.

Looking at this animal, you may notice a few things. The most obvious observation is that she is incredibly obese, so fat that her mobility was limited because she would step on her own gut with her hind legs when she attempted to walk. What you can't see is everything happening below the skin: poor muscle tone, painful joints, metabolic bone disease, fat-strangled organs, and hepatic lipidosis ravaging the liver.

When asked about this beardie's care, we learned that she was living in a 40 gallon terrarium with a 100watt incandescent heat lamp, 10.0 compact florescent bulb, and was fed a diet of 20-30 crickets or meal worms per day. She was reportedly offered lettuce and carrots, but would eat neither, probably because she was full of 20-30 crickets or mealworms. The crickets were calcium powdered, but not on an appropriate schedule or with the proper rotations of Calcium, Calcium +D, and Multivitamin.

She did not have enough space for exercise and enrichment. She did not have an appropriate basking temperature or heat gradient, nor a powerful enough UVB source. Her diet, which at adulthood should have been primarily vegetation-based, was centered on excessive and low quality protein items. She was receiving too much calcium and vitamin D for a mature animal, and not enough of anything else. And because of all of those factors, she was sick and suffering.

While pet owners are fully accountable for doing the appropriate research to ensure that their pets receive proper care, I do think the commercial pet trade is an enabler of and complicit in the widespread neglect of common exotics. Big box stores like Petsmart and Petco have mainstreamed several species of reptile under the guise of them being "easy beginner pets," marketed with tank-and-supply bundled kits that are barely adequate for short-term housing, let alone proper lifelong husbandry. They source their animals from breeders and brokers with well documented neglect conditions and a laundry list of repeated USDA violations. There is no way to ethically mass produce and mass market live animals for profit, full stop, period.