Posted by:
PHLdyPayne
at Wed Jan 20 11:16:09 2010 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by PHLdyPayne ]
Yes, the best quarantine time is three months or more, with a couple clean fecals and a full vet examination. A separate room is necessary as well and as moonstone indicates, feeding/cleaning the new dragon last, even cleaning feeding bowls etc in a separate sink to prevent spread of disease.
It may seem alot of extra work and maybe 90% of the time completely unnecessary but dragons and most animals, by instinct, hide their illnesses as well as they can for in the wild, a sick or weak animal because the first target a predator will go for. Then there are some diseases that don't manifest any symptoms till its so far progressed the dragon gets sick and dies quite quickly, so even if the animal shows absolutely no sign of being sick, it can still be sick.
Also, a perfectly healthy dragon can become sick simply from the stress of being moved from the breeder/seller to the buyer's home. Stress can weaken the dragon's own natural resistance to internal parasites which can flare up. Often they don't need treatment, just quiet time in their new home to adjust and their body will slowly reduce the parasite load back to normal. Not always the case but it will depend on how long the dragon is stressed. Putting the dragon right in with another adds a new level of stress...even if the dragon behaves normally. It also exposes the established dragon to contact with the parasites of the new dragon (ie if it poops and the established dragon gets in contact with the poop before it can be cleaned up) can suddenly find itself with an influx of internal parasites, also it is stressed as well, with a new comer to its territory. Thus not only does the original dragon experience stress by having a strange dragon dumped into its territory and chasing it around to mate, while in a weakened state it can be exposed to parasites etc, making it more likely to get sick.
If neither dragon isn't in perfect health, the risks are higher. Or if husbandry isn't perfect to begin with complications could arise especially if your female now has been mated and if sexually mature enough to produce eggs, will have the added stress of egg production.
Nothing may happen but there are fatal diseases in bearded dragons, like the adreno-virus which can quickly spread throughout an entire collection from an otherwise healthy looking dragon. There have been people here who lost most if not all their collection to this virus because they introduced a dragon that wasn't quarantined. It wasn't all that long ago I read on the ball python forum, about somebody who bought a couple ball pythons and introduced them directly with him other pythons to breed and ended up losing not only the original animals he ordered, but nearly half of his ball pythons and some of his boas due to a very deadly and non curable disease affecting boids called IBD.
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PHLdyPayne
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RE: aggression - PHLdyPayne, Wed Jan 20 11:16:09 2010