Absolutely. We got our first beardie from Petsmart, we thought he was cute, we picked up supplies for him from there, you know, stuff that's obviously for them since their picture is on it or we saw it in the viv they had set up- some calcisand :roll:, a rock cave, a water dish, a basking light, and crickets (we'd give him about 3-4 per day). About a month or 2 later, he started having terrible seizures- falling from the top of his branches onto the ground and just laying their twitching. For some reason it was instinctual to me to put him in some water and then take him outside. We made an emergency trip to petsmart to see what was wrong with him and the reptile guy said oh he needs a
uvb light, ok simple enough, he went and got one off the shelf for us. a few weeks later there was still no improvement, it was terrible we felt so bad. Our saving grace came from our new puppy's dog trainer at Petsmart, she was amazing, we happened to mention to her we had a bearded dragon from the store that looked like he wasn't going to make it. She asked us a few questions about what we were feeding him and what his environment was like. She told us she has 2 bearded dragons of her own and that the store (talking about her own store!) treats them terribly and doesn't educate people at all when they purchase them. She told us get him off the sand, take out the
uvb light petsmart sold us (she told us it was better for him to have no uvb while we waited for the new one to come in because the old one was so bad for them, that amazed me), get some calcium to dust his food, and go buy some baby food squash to feed him because his stomach was probably impacted from the sand. She is the reason we came to this site (she provided the url to us) and why our Norman is alive.
I definitely believe there needs to be more customer education before they purchase ANY pet. We had no idea this little tiny lizard we bought was going to be eating 30$/week in crickets, but lets be blunt, they hadn't told us anything about him. Once we made the changes that the dog trainer (the dog trainer! why didn't the "reptile guy" tell us any of this!) told us about, we had a changed lizard who was much much happier. Not to mention he grew like a weed! We had made the major changes then and then my fiance continued reading on this site and we have been learning so much more about how to make sure the temps are right, etc.
We look at the bearded dragons everytime we go to the petstore to buy crickets, and I'm so saddened by their condition and you can tell they're not happy either - some we have seen are completely black, stomachs and all. We were at Petco the other day and one was dancing on the window and was so happy when we were walking back and forth it was following us, and i just thought, i need to get this little baby out of here. so we adopted our second beardie and are excited to be able to raise her and give her a great life from the get-go knowing everything we know now.
But I must mention, all we did was point to the one we wanted and the girl got it out for us. She didn't say one word about how to care for it or anything that we needed (we had everything set up at home already so all we bought with her was a cricket container and a water bowl - I guess that's all they need :roll: ) We also signed an adoption paper that I didn't read all of until we got home, and it says "I have received a
care sheet for my new animal". Nope, didn't even get that.
I think there needs to be stricter rules and enforcement of how they are sold and how they are kept in the store. It's just cruel. If you can't house them correctly or give the customer some information before they buy them so that they know what they're getting into, your store does not deserve to sell them . I just wish there was a way to make the big corporations hear these concerns and make changes to what they're doing.