Hey guys! So my mother in law calls me yesterday and tells me there's a lady in her neighborhood trying to rehome her bearded dragon because "her kids just don't have time for it anymore" and asked if we would take it. Of course we will, but thanks for asking before just bringing him over. We've got a juvenile dragon and just lost our very old beardie a couple months ago. So, she goes to get this guy and calls me to tell me he's missing part of his tail and a toe or two. Ok, whatever, just bring him over and we'll take a look and get him fixed up.
They get here with him and he's a sweet 3 year old well socialized beardie. He's not been cared for...at all. It looks like he's never had a complete shed as he has several spots with layer upon layer of stuck shed, he was living on the most disgusting reptile carpet, is missing more than "a couple" toes but they are healed over, and at some point had trauma or stuck shed bad enough that he got tail rot and lost what I would guess is at least 3 inches of his tail. It seems to be healed over, but I've reached out to my reptile vet just to have him take a look to make sure there's no more necrosis and no infection. We soaked him yesterday as soon as he got here and got some stuck shed off with a toothbrush and got his nails clipped. I cleaned his tail with chlorhexidine and put some polysporin on it. We'll repeat all of this until we're down through all of those sheds, his nails are an acceptable length, and his tail is taken care of.
Although he has all of these issues, none of these are my actual question. There was never dominant/submissive behavior between our juvenile and our geriatric beardie. They lived across from each other and neither one cared, I would assume because both were female and Noodle Mama was 13 years old and just didn't care anymore. Knowing that this dominant/submissive behavior can happen between a male and female beardie, we put them on opposing sides of our living room where we figured they wouldn't be able to see each other. They're on intersecting walls with a TV between them. This morning Chubs (our new rescue male) had his beard all black and was bobbing his head. So I looked over to Shadow and she's doing the wave. Noooooooo! So my ACTUAL question is - will they work this out like dogs do or will he always bob and her? I WILL move him to a different location if it's something they won't be able to work out because I don't want either of them to be stressed out. For now we blocked off the front of his enclosure and the waving stopped. I wasn't able to find any useful information in a quick Google search so I thought I would reach out to you guys.
Thanks so much for any help you can provide!
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