How to get a Bearded Dragon to eat it's veggies??

[LoneGreyWolf20]

My friend has a 4 year old Bearded Dragon that she bought from a pet store. They had gotten him off of someone that was moving cross country and couldn't take him. She did talk with the original owner and he told her that the dragon used to eat greens all the time.

Now that she has him he's not eating any at all. All he wants is crickets and no veggies. I'm thinking that the pet store didn't give him any greens or anything and kinda spoiled him in that regard as he was there about 2 months or so.

How can she get him to eat his veggies? She offers him a variety everyday, but he hasn't touched them.

Any ideas?

 

[gulfbrzdawn]

Definitely keep giving him a variety of veggies like you are.

Has she tried any kind of worms such as superworms,phoenixworms,etc...??

Sometimes mixing the worms in with their salad helps. The beardie may accidently get veggies while eating the worms and decide he likes them.

She could also try handfeeding some greens to her beardie(mine loves that..spoiled little brat).

Since he's not used to having the veggies, it could take some time to get him back on them again. Tell your friend to be patient he'll come around eventually.

Good Luck,

Dawn

 

[ScooterBlenny]

I second mixing worms in with veggies...also, you might try skipping live food in the morning for a day or two. Sometimes they get hungry enough around lunchtime that they try the greens I would still feed live food at night, no need to torture the lil guy, but the mid-day munchies can help get them to eat veggies.

 

[Catalyst]

Since he's 4 he should only be getting 25-50 live bugs a week anyway, so she could try holding off on the live food for a couple of days while offering a variety of veggies and greens. Or, offer live food on a random schedule - for instance, when my girl is awake (currently brumating) she gets superworms 2 or 3 times a week, always on different days and always at night. This way she can't count on getting her worms to fill her up and is more likely to try her salad. Only doing live food at night also makes her more likely to eat salad - I find when I give her the worms in teh morning she generally ignores her salad that day, go figure.

Mixing bugs in with the salad is a good idea, especially if you use silkworms or other bugs that grab onto the greens so that your dragon is more likely to get a mouth full of greens along with the bug.

Using different colours of food (i.e. prickly pear, yellow squash, orange carrots) can sometimes help attract a dragon to their salad, as can different smells (some have found a small amount of parsley sprinkled into the salad helps).