I hear you, and please don't think that I was blaming you in any way for not knowing proper care/husbandry, you have no idea how many people come on here who have just recently purchased their first baby dragon, or dragons, and have had them for a month or so and love them to death, and all of a sudden they stop eating, become very lethargic and sleep all the time, start losing weight, etc., and then the poor owner posts all of their husbandry info. and finds out that pretty much every piece of equipment the pet shop employees told them to buy is completely inadequate for a Bearded Dragon, specifically the lighting. I would be willing to take a guess that as high as 80% or more of people who buy their first Dragon buy an extremely weak compact or coil
UVB bulb, or no
UVB bulb at all, a red or blue basking or "day" bulb, calcium sand or crushed walnut shell substrates, and sometimes they are even talked into buying things that are made specifically for tropical reptiles and that are totally unnecessary for a Dragon, like a "humidifier" system or a mister, like one of those "Monsoon" systems, which are not at all cheap. And this is all at the recommendation of a pet shop employee. And these are not just employees at Petco, PetSmart, or PetLand, the Big-Box chain stores, but often these are employees at small, independent pet shops, and sometimes even at Reptile "Specialty" Stores! It's unreal. And then you have all of the Bearded Dragon "Kits" that all of the major manufacturers sell, none of which come with anything other than a compact or coil
UVB bulb that is 13 watts, usually a red basking/nighttime bulb, and a bag of calcium sand with a stick-on thermometer. It's ridiculous, the only thing people end up keeping from any of those kits is the tank itself.
Quick story, there is a very small shopping mall where I live, it's basically been a dying mall for the last 2 decades (which makes no sense since I live in a town that is the location of one of the largest Universities in the country, we have to drive 30 minutes to go to a real mall). Back when I was a young kid in the 80's and early 90's this mall was the place to go shopping for clothing, shoes, etc., it was full and had every major store available. There was a pet shop way back then in this mall, that I remember going into all the time, every time my mom and I went shopping I made her go into the pet shop to look at the puppies, birds, and the lizards and turtles, it was a very successful pet shop. Now I was born in 1979, so I'm now 38 years old, and the time period I'm talking about was from the time I was born up until I was in college, probably around 1998-1999 is when this mall started to die away, I don't really know why considering the 100,000 college students who live here. Now there isn't even a GAP or an American Eagle in this mall, and the Sears and the Bon Ton are closing right now. Anyway, there hasn't been a pet shop in this mall since that first one that I was talking about, and they closed down when I was in Junior High or High School. Fast-Forward to this past summer, around May or June, when I took a drive to a very large, independent pet shop about 35 minutes away from here to buy a new filter for my aquarium, and I asked them what live feeder insects they sold, of course it was only crickets and mealworms, but the woman who worked there said to me "Well if you're from State College, have you checked that new pet shop in the mall to see what feeder-insects they sell?" I hadn't gone to the mall here in probably a year or so (I literally live right next to this mall, lol, it's a 5 minute walk and a 1 minute drive from my house, but besides an Express there is no reason to go), and I had no idea that there was a new pet shop in the mall. The woman said "Oh yeah, they're extremely expensive, ridiculous actually, my daughter wanted a young bunny and we didn't have any young ones at the time (this other pet shop breeds every single live pet that they sell), so we decided to check out this new pet shop in the mall in State College, and they had 6 little tiny bunnies for $80 a piece!" So I wasn't optimistic but since the mall is literally across the highway from my house and i had to drive past it anyway, I decided to stop and check it out...I walk in and find it (there are way more empty spaces than open stores in this mall now), it's in the same space where the GameStop used to be, which pissed me off, lol, but I walked in and started chatting with this older woman about the store. She was probably in her mid-60's or so, and as soon as I told her I wasn't aware until that day that their store was even here, she started giving me the entire run-down about how her son is the main owner, he and his wife, and how she worked in the shop basically for free to help them out because they were having financial issues so they decided to open this pet shop up in addition to working their regular jobs, because they had decades worth of experience with pets, specifically aquarium fish. This shop is a nice little shop, very small, but has a huge amount of fresh-water fish, it's obvious that this guy knows his stuff when it comes to fresh and salt water aquariums, he has far more types of fish and aquarium life than any Petco or Petsmart, and then they had some bunnies, hamsters, guinea pigs, rats, and then I saw a leopard gecko in a tank, who looked healthy and the tank set-up was fine. I thought that the gecko was the only reptile they had (they are definitely a store that wants to sell live aquarium life and then equipment for aquariums, reptiles, rodents, and birds, they aren't really a live-animal selling pet shop), but I round the corner and that's when I saw the 2 Bearded Dragons and I lost my ****...
Sorry that I'm rambling here with this story, but it's meant to make you feel better, lol, I swear it is...anyone who is annoyed by this story doesn't have to read it...Anyway, I see this 20-gallon Long aquarium tank with 2 dragons inside it. They were young juvenile dragons, she told me they were 5 months old when I asked her if they were the same age, as of course one of the dragons was twice the size of the other one. She told me that they had been there since they were 2 months old and small babies, and they were always housed together. I could definitely tell that they had always been housed together based on the size difference between them, this was a result of the domination of the one over the other. But that wasn't what I was most concerned about at that point...One of them was a Leatherback Dragon that looked to be normal colored, he was the much larger, dominant dragon, and he cost $150. The smaller, submissive dragon was half the size of the other one, was a normal scaled dragon, but was the most beautiful colored dragon I have every seen. They had it labeled as a "Pastel" Dragon, obviously that isn't the proper name of the color she was, but it was actually a good description, as her overall base color was a very, very faint, light pink, and then she had splotches of the lightest shades of blue, green, and cream you've every seen all over her. She was gorgeous. She cost $300. However, not only was this poor girl stunted in growth due to being housed together with this other dominant male dragon since they had gotten both of them in 3 months prior, but this poor, beautiful female dragon was missing about half of her tail, and the stump that remained was black as coal, seeping bright-green, thick pus, and the necrosis was moving up her tail. I got right up against the tank to look more closely at the Tail-Rot she was suffering from, and that's when I saw that she was missing several toes on both of her back feet, and 1 toe on each of her two front feet, and on one of her back feet she had black, necrotic tissue moving into her foot. She also had a big chunk taken out of her lip on the right side of her face that was all nasty. Just to make things as bad as they could possibly be, they had about 2 inches of white calcium sand in the bottom of the tank, so of course the sand was stuck to every open wound this poor, $300 dragon had. I took a quick look at their lights, the least of my concerns at the time, but of course they had coiled
UVB bulb over the Cool Side of the tank, sitting on the mesh lid, and whatever basking bulb they were using over the Hot Side of the tank (at least the basking bulb was white), no thermometers in the tank, not even a stick-on one, and one big branch going the length of the 20 gallon tank to bask on, which the big, dominant dragon was sitting on directly under the coiled
UVB bulb, trying to get himself as close to the
UVB light as he could. I could hardly look at the poor girl dragon, she was so beautiful yet was just ripped apart, literally. The tail was bad enough, but she was missing a total of 6 toes and had necrotic tissue all over her body. I decided that I would pay the $6.75 plus tax for 25 large Superworms (uhg) just so I could break the ice with this woman and start a conversation about this dragon that they were trying to sell for $300 who was going to die of sepsis without medical care ASAP.
That's when I found out that this woman and her son were the people who owned the original pet shop that was in this mall back when I was a kid! I had started out saying to her that "I had no idea your store was here until today when someone mentioned it to me, I remember back in the 80's when I was a little kid there was a pet shop here, it was all the way on the other end of the mall", and that's when she cut me off and told me that it was she and her son who also owned that store...So my point to this long, boring story is that here are 2 people who originally opened and ran a very successful pet shop from the late 70's up until the early 90's, and who kept on breeding and selling certain animals privately during their hiatus, and who now have opened up another pet shop who actually say in their ads that they "Specialize in selling equipment and decor for reptiles", and they made the EXACT SAME mistakes that you did, you, a person who had just purchased his very first Bearded Dragon and who was given horrible advice by a pet shop employee who only cared about wanting to sell 2 dragons to you instead of one, and who probably, to their credit, had never been trained about what lighting is appropriate for what reptiles or anything else. That's the problem.
So the bottom line is please don't beat yourself up over making the mistakes you did, I'm very certain that had that pet shop employee been educated at all about Bearded Dragons and had told you "Well, if you purchase 2 Bearded Dragons then you have to buy 2 complete set-ups with 2 of everything, lights, tanks, decor, etc. because they cannot ever be housed together", that you would not have purchased both dragons, unless you were able to afford 2 complete set-ups. You simply just didn't know, and not because you didn't ask, but because the person you asked, who is selling these living creatures for their living, had no idea what the hell they were talking about. And if 2 people who have owned 2 different pet shops for decades and who "specialize" in selling reptile lighting and equipment can make the exact same mistakes that people buying their very first bearded dragon make, then how in world are new owners supposed to even have a chance in hell of getting it right?
