Bearded Dragon Care - How to Choose a Bearded Dragon

Holli Friedland: I am Holli Friedland, Program Director of the Mid-Atlantic Reptile Show and this is How to Care for a Bearded Dragon. Now we are going to talk about how to choose the right bearded dragon for you. You want to make sure that they have bright eye's and that they have all their toes and their tail. You also want to make sure that when they get bigger, if you buy baby bearded dragons as they get older, you want to make sure that you only have one male in a group if you are keeping a group of them. If you have just one it really doesn't matter. But if you have a group you can only have one male because if you have more than one male they are going to fight with each other and they will fight until one is badly injured and could end up loosing a tail or a limb. Breaded dragons comes from Australia and all exports out of Australia are closed right now. So any reptile that you get is Australian should be captive bred. Captive bred animals are always better than wild caught animals. Wild caught animals often have parasites and they have -- they are usually banged up looking and they are just not as healthy and as clean as captive bred animals are. So even if you are not getting a breaded dragon, you always want to try to get captive bred. And when you get your breaded dragon you want to find out what it's eating from the breeder. That way you know what to feed it when you get home. When they are babies their diet is different then when they are adults. So you have to keep that in mind to. Next we will talk about handling your breaded dragon.