The Facebook group in this case started with a positive idea: helping those who are new to animal keeping. But it’s quickly transformed into an epicentre of untruths. They claim that their aim is to remove all the technicalities, thus making things easy for new keepers to understand. But I argue that by removing every single technicality, the finer details and facts get lost, and new keepers are misinformed about how much more there is to learn.
Of course, it’s not just poorly-managed Facebook groups that are guilty of this. Pet shops could take the prize as the worst offenders. In the UK, we have a system in place for licencing pet shops – it’s called the Animal Activities Licence (or AAL for short)[4].
As a part of AAL, animal sellers have to ensure certain standards are met. And they have to train their staff appropriately. Sounds like a good thing, right? Well, it would be, but it’s enforced by local councils. And the people in charge of the AAL are also in charge of licencing for tattoo shops, waste disposal centres, gambling, taxis, and more. The same person expected to “judge” how appropriate a pet shop also has to be able to judge how appropriate and safe a waste disposal centre is. There’s no way that one person can be a specialist in the vast range of subjects for licencing a whole bunch of industries.
This is where it falls apart. Licence officers, as they are known, go into a pet shop and are amazed by the fact that there is an iguana in a tank, they’re like a child in a candy store. It doesn’t take much to convince these officers that the store is fantastic, even if it’s not. The pet shops can very easily get a “5 star” rating just by impressing the officer with a large snake. It honestly doesn’t take much to get them to say “wow!”
What you end up with is a store with untrained staff and no formal procedure in place for getting them properly qualified. Staff who themselves don’t know the “truth” about the reasons we might provide extra light to a bearded dragon. They have the same mentality of “if it’s eating, pooping, sleeping, breeding, then it’s happy.”
(Side note: It’s one of my biggest peeves to see a pet shop or private seller say that an animal is “doing everything it should.” I cringe at it every time – what is “everything it should”?!)
I can’t go much further without mentioning the manufacturers and brands. Yep, even their hands aren’t clean. The most obvious example is when heat lamps are marketed as having “UVA” in their output. Although technically this is true, I can’t begin to describe how little UVA there is in a heat lamp. The amount of UVA is less than 0.5% of the output of the lamp – it’s certainly not a “UVA lamp,” despite what’s written on the box.
Another example is the hype around heat projectors in recent years. Proclaimed to be “rich in Infrared-A” and “Sun-replicating heat,” these bulbs emit only about 3% Infrared-A. Compare that to the approximately 42% that is present in daylight — this makes them totally inadequate as basking lamps.
See the pattern here? Sometimes the information on the box isn’t giving us the whole picture. Although manufacturers aren’t technically lying when they say that a heat lamp has UVA, and a heat projector has Infrared-A, it certainly doesn’t feel like the truth. It looks more like marketing hype than science to me.
Put these things together, and we start to see the disturbing pattern that shapes a majority of the reptile hobby:
- A new keeper buys a bearded dragon from the “specialist pet shop” with inadequate advice.
- They buy equipment that gives them half-truths on the box.
- They go onto a bearded dragon Facebook group and get given equally inadequate advice.
- After 3 years of keeping, they consider themselves an expert and become an admin on one of the same groups to spout the same inadequate advice to the next generation.
