How We Review Products & Make Recommendations

Here is a list of the things we ALWAYS do before reviewing or recommending a product or course of action.

✅ We Start With What We Do For Our Own Bearded Dragons

We are beardie parents first and foremost. Our pets ARE our family, and we take their health and care very seriously. We never recommend things on our site unless we are using them ourselves.

When we find things that work for our bearded dragons, as well as what has been shown to help others, then and only then do we share them.

✅ We Regularly Consult With Vets And Breeders

On our about page, we explain what we call our “board of beardie advisors.” While not technically a “board”, this is the list of people we call for help or with questions when we need it.

There are several topics where what we do with our bearded dragons (and therefore recommend to you) differs greatly from the “conventional wisdom” online in forums and on other bearded dragon sites.

Whenever that happens, it’s because we are following the advice of respected reptile vets and breeders. We call this out specifically in our articles when it happens.

Rest assured that if you read something on Beardie Bungalow that goes against what you may have read elsewhere on the internet, it’s because a vet, a breeder, or both have disagreed with that common “internet knowledge”.

✅ We Thoroughly Research Every Article In Scientific And Scholarly Journals

In addition to years of personal experience raising bearded dragons and close relationships with vets and breeders, we also verify all care and behavioral advice in highly respected publications.

We then cite those references in each article. When you are helping people care for their pets, it’s critical to get things right. We feel that this step, while very time-consuming, is vitally important to the accuracy of our articles and site as a whole.

What We Don’t Do:

There are a few things we never do here in the Beardie Bungalow.

❌ Take Sponsorship Fees

Many brands regularly offer to pay us to be featured on our site, but we always refuse these offers. We feel it’s our editorial responsibility to feature the best products and care advice because we love bearded dragons more than money.

❌ Recommend Easy And Cheap Instead Of The Best

It’s natural for people to want things to be easy and inexpensive. And if you can do that with no impact on quality, go for it! But when it comes to caring for our beloved pets, we don’t believe in providing anything but the best possible options.

Here are some examples:

• The easiest insect feeder to get is crickets. As the worst possible insect feeder for your bearded dragon, we don’t recommend them. We recommend Dubia roaches instead.
• The easiest substrate is reptile carpet. It’s far from the best, though, so we don’t recommend it.
• The cheapest enclosure is a used aquarium. We recommend people never use these and to use a reptile-specific enclosure instead.

These are just a few of the cases where we go against what other are recommending because it’s cheap and easy and instead recommend what’s right.

❌ Copy Other Websites

Part of our research process is to read what other people are writing online about bearded dragons. We are almost always very disappointed at the results when we do.

So many bearded dragon websites simply take the info they find on other beardie sites and summarize it all on their own. They don’t own bearded dragons. They don’t understand bearded dragon husbandry.

We strive to offer experience-based advice that’s backed up by experts and extensive research, not just to simply parrot what some “internet experts” have already said.