Meet the 10 Year Old Rescue Bearded Dragon!

Today I wanted to share with you one of the

dragon

s we found recently. Someone brought this to us at Repticon. He is a 10

year

old

bearded

dragon

and I suppose he has had some pretty interesting problems throughout his life, an interesting breeding and some interesting problems that still occur today. But first, I just want to tell you a little about him. So, like I said, he's 10

year

s old; that the average life expectancy according to the first thing that appears on Google is about 10 to 12 years for

bearded

dragons. And his age definitely shows. There are things I've never seen before in dragons that you can see in him.

Firstly, the amount of loose skin he has. Like he's not really underweight, but he's just so flabby in certain places. You can see it, especially below his throat. And a little bit on the sides or spikes, but it's mostly in the throat area. Something at some point in his life caused metabolic bone disease or MBD because his front legs are actually locked in place. His joints are essentially solidified. He can't open his arms, as you can see I'm adding a little strength to him...but I can't move him without literally breaking his arm. That's why he tends to lie down on the ground.

Typically, when bearded dragons are active and alert, they push them up and keep their bellies off the ground. It's okay if you just relax on a nice warm rock and are depressed but he physically can't stay awake. He's just in this current state and his poor mangled arm is lying there. And we think that's one of the reasons why he had a problem that I've never seen before in a dragon and that is impacted femoral pores. Those are the pores, like right under the legs. Only males have them because they secrete these oils. They mark different areas with them and these oils are the same, like a mammal urinating on something.

But we think it's because maybe he never bathed or because he couldn't lift his body off the ground and that those pores ended up impacted with his oils. Basically, the oil solidified inside the pore and became completely clogged there, i.e. impacted. Another possibility is that they kept it in Calci-sand, our substrate that we've talked about a bit here on the channel. And Calci-sand, just a quick summary, if you don't know, it's not something you want to use. I won't go into details in this video. The mixture of him being directly on the Calci sand with his femoral pores never being able to lift off the ground in this, as a loose substrate that probably filled his pores along with the actual oils, created these hard little rocks.

We recorded different parts of how to remove them and you could literally hear them hitting the table when you dropped the stones. They were so solid. This used to be a liquid, a few years ago. We don't know if these pores, these pore blockages were a couple of months old or ten years old. But it seems they were never removed. Things like using a toothbrush to just scrub them over time, you could... That works if it's a little loose, like a little sticky, maybe, but if it's like a rock solid, it just wouldn't move, it was the same thing. .

It's just like scrubbing a stone, nothing will happen when you do that. So we basically had to start pulling on them and squeezing them without hurting him. He got upset at certain points, so we had to go slow and take our time. I did it for 3 or 4 sessions, but we finally eliminated all of them, I guess it was 12. And we have a video of it. It's gross and kind of satisfying. Here you have a new bearded one that they gave us yesterday. He's at least 10 years old and some pretty weird things happen to him. We'll focus on some issues with your femoral pores at the bottom.

Unfortunately, he has MBD, so his front legs are locked in place. That's pretty disappointing. Luckily, he can still move because he can go like this, like woop woop, woop, woop, but not like a normal barbet, where there are two joints and he just goes like this. And apparently, that is one of the common causes of completely clogged pores. And if the pores remain clogged, it can cause an infection which, depending on how severe it is, I suppose, could eventually kill them, like any infection. So, we need to clean these babies up. It may take a few tries.

Maybe we need to pick up some medicine or ointments or something. Right now, let's try a bath, a nice warm bath and see what happens. Look... Look at them under the skin. Anyway, along with those problems, the last most notable problem we've had is that he hasn't eaten anything. We've had it for two weeks. We have tried all the foods in the room. Every fruit, every vegetable, every insect. We got so desperate that we tried the turtle pellets. So, I was eating bearded dragon balls. I hadn't even heard of these. They look very disgusting. To contextualize, the ingredients they contain are soy flour, rice bran, whole almonds and whole wheat.

Those are all essentially fillers I guess, I don't know. Some of them don't even seem necessary as filler. But nothing that, you know, the bearded man is sure to eat. So, I'm really sad to see that I spent $8 on these because I threw away his old box, so I didn't plan on giving it to him, but now we have some. I crushed it. It's in a bowl now. Let's see if he wants it. And as you can see, luckily he can still move his front legs. It's a little uncomfortable, a little mangled looking, and can move.

But it doesn't move much. And now, he's just trying to get away from this poor food. Yes, oh God! Is that good? Don't go through it. Here. Don't mix them. He's... While we wait here to see if he wants this really disgusting looking mix, a little more about him, we... This is an animal, if you don't know Animal Scales, it's the company where we... - Oh , the bearded man ate. Wow! I mean, he ate the... Look. I'm going to disgust all the viewers. Well, this didn't go as planned, which is great. Actually, he is eating insects.

Something we couldn't get him to do several times a week for the last two weeks. So he can keep eating them, we need him to eat something. Hopefully, that means I don't have to use this bug... These pellets, I mean. And continue with the insects until he starts eating vegetables. Anyway, it's all about him, we have him and generally animals like this, where we, like they clearly don't have the best quality you could say or the best health, we were like, we have him marked as a

rescue

. and then they can find a new home so their owner knows that there may be special needs or other problems or that they are not what you would get from a real breeder.

So, we'll do that with him, but we don't know how long his life will be. It could be like 5 days or like 5 years. I don't think it's any of those numbers. Hopefully more than 5 days but 5 years is like really trying hard. So obviously we have no way of estimating how long he will have it...he has, as with the new owner of it. So I wouldn't want to have an animal and then like a month later he just left because I'll be sad. Also, things like shipping. I don't...he is an old man. We don't know if we can, if he likes it, be in a box for 24 hours or 12 hours or whatever, like all the animals we've had.

He has been perfectly fine. We ship them all the time, but an animal in this condition would be a little worrying. And it's not a condition he'd like to be cured of, since he's simply old. Well, as you can see, he... gave up. A bit. We'll see if he keeps eating, so I change plans. I'll keep these just in case, but I'll try to never feed them again, you know, just look at it. Well, fortunately, that is one of the problems solved. The femoral pores. I hope he keeps going. No. He just staggers awkwardly. He would show you other beardies for comparison, but they will literally try to kill each other, to death, if I take them out.

There were... two other beardies here could be seen earlier and they were like having a swinging contest, so we'll avoid that now. Overall, he is still a beautiful bearded man. It has tons of yellow colors. His eyes are amazing. I don't know the exact way, I should, but... So now let's see if he accepts some plant matter because we're on a roll. Well, as you can see, this would be something we'll have to work on because we don't know what's going on with this diet. Basically, I want to give you a good summary to show you some problems we've never had.

Still, impacted femoral pores are the strangest problem... Not the strangest. We've had some strange problems, but one of those problems that I didn't even know could really happen. I'll try to show you some healthy pores for comparison, but they should basically be a neutral color, compared to the rest of your body. Maybe a little bit darker, which is like a ring around it and like a pore. Imagine a pore on an animal. This is how it should look. Not like black craters that simply ooze dark matter. So we'll keep watching it and make sure it's good.

You'll enjoy some nice hot baths to hopefully keep them moving continuously because I'm sure you're not comfortable with the ones stuck, and who knows how far the oils go in there. So we want to make sure he can get through that like a normal beardie. It's awesome when, like when he sees that another beardie is... He'll immediately start sharing the domination with his head bobbing and all. He doesn't back down and his energy explodes right there, so we want to keep him calm in that moment, but I don't want to irritate him too much. Who knows, if you've seen another beardie in person before, it's him.

Hopefully, I enjoyed a quick little recap from our friend here.