We rescued a Water dragon from a pet store april 30th. not that the pet store was doing anything wrong, their cages were immaculately clean. We went there to buy a frill, which we did and is doing very very good. This water dragon they have had since it was a baby, it is captive bred. They had sold and given it to like 4 people now and each time the person couldn't seem to care for it and brought it back to the pet store more damaged than when it left. we don't know what kind of enclosures it's been kept in but it has ground the front of his mouth down completely thru his top front teeth. also his front feet are tore up and he's missing several toes also presumably from trying to get out of his cages. the first couple days his vision seemed horrible and he hunted down the crickets appearently entirely by sound. neat to watch but not good for him. he is a sweet heart though, calmly dealing with all our cleaning and bathing and patching up with almost no arguements. it looks like of the toes he has left on his front feet he may loose another one but we might be able to save it, he'll probably never have movement in it again and some other toes though bad, seem to be healing up. the front of his mouth when we got him was packed with dirt and scabs, we cleaned those out and it looks much better. though still horrible with his teeth and jaw showing. he eats like crazy and loves his food. even eating a couple pinkie mice a couple days ago since he needs to put on weight. the pet store told us that all they could get him to eat was crickets and he would not eat any worms, we assume that it was because he couldn't hear them. his vision seems to be getting better, more so in his right eye than his left. but this morning, while i was starting to write this post, my wife noticed a couple specs of dirt in his eye, which is odd since we have no dirt in our house, all our lizards cages are lined with newspaper to keep the humidity down since we live in florida and because most substrates seemed to get in the eyes of our herps while they were babies. i got some moistened q-tips to get the dirt out and found out he had a ton of dirt packed into the upper back corner of his eye up under the top eyelid. it looked like it was from the substrate that comes in a brick and you add water and it expands in to a huge dirty mess, we tried it once with our iguana and never used it again cus it gunked into everything. the water dragon argued almost none while pulling this dirt out of his eye, he twitched away a couple times but he seems to know we're helping him and he goes limp when we're doing stuff to him that sucks, very useful. so i checked his other eye and found a good sized clump in there too. it came out in one nice good chunk so that was good. he's now feeling better than he already was and actually ate some giant mealworms this morning since he can see better because we've been cleanin his eye goobers out of his eye the last couple days. we put him in one of those premade black mesh cages that we washed and then put thru the dryer on low for 10 minutes that really seemed to soften it up. also he's grown really attached to sitting in my wifes lap or on her shoulder and he sees no reason that he should be left in a cage when she's around so he'll try to get thru the cage but that soft mesh makes him bump it more than grind down it so that's helped alot with limiting the damage. we also noticed that if we put a towel over the cage when we're in the room he doesn't try to get out of the cage and will just jump around and play in his water dish or sleep. he's doing very very good and he's so tame and really well behaved, already starting to only go to the bathroom in his dish or when we put him in the tub. he's going to the bathroom twice a day, i don't know if this is to much, when compared to the iguana that only goes once a day or the beardies that only go every other day. any more advice on what we can do to help him heal would be appreciated and maybe this will help others with preventing damage to their babies. right now he's sitting on the couch looking at everything, before he would only look if he saw movement. and the first day barely responded to any kind of movement or light and his eye's were completely dilated and didn't respond to light so we thought he was completely blind. his right eye does look like it's been scratched as it has a grey spec that almost looks like the beginning of a catarac but is probably just a scrape. hopefully it will heal now.

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