- Joined
- May 18, 2012
- Messages
- 14
Hello All,
I wanted to take a moment to put out a warning to fellow reptile folks about doing business with Deer Fern Farms and Douglas Dix. I purchased two pancake tortoises from him back in January at a reptile expo in Portland. While I should have been more wary of purchasing at an expo my husband and I got excited when we saw four juvenile pancake tortoises since we had been researching and looking into acquiring some. At first glance the Deer Fern Farms stand seemed different from the other ones. There weren’t a lot of hatchlings and the man running the booth wasn’t letting everyone walking by hold all the animals. We should have continued walking by. We talked with the man at the booth (Douglas Dix) for a while about his collection and the four pancakes he had there. Everything seemed to be answered sufficiently and we ended up purchasing two, one male and one female, that we named Maple and John Wayne. After we got them we started noticing things wrong with them and took them to our exotic vet. Our vet in conjunction with two other very well respected exotic veterinarians worked very hard at saving both Maple and John Wayne. They were infested with parasites (coccidian, pinworms, etc) and had had them for a considerable length of time (judge on their overall body composition and blood work). There bodies had been robbed of nutrients and their immune systems were shot and after several rounds of antibiotics (injected and oral), de-wormer, metronidazole, and force feeding with supplementation mixed in Maple lost her battle on June 19th and John Wayne passed a week later. Now being that it is December some may wonder “why now?†and that is a great question. Due to his reputation in many different reptile forums I had thought that maybe just maybe this was an isolated incident and I am not one to want to put a sour note on someone reputation. However this past week I received a message from a vet in Arizona that I used to work with. Again he is a very well respected vet that works with both reptile and avian societies and travels the country to not only attend but speak at various exotic medicine conventions. There recently was the Phoenix Herp Expo where Deer Fern Farms was there selling their reptiles. A client of this vet purchased a pancake tortoise from Deer Fern Farms that he is now treating for a severe case of coccidia and we are all hoping that this tortoise will respond to treatment better than our two did. Being that both this tortoise and ours had similar issues and where sold almost a year apart it leads me to believe that this may be an ongoing issue with this breeder and anyone wanting to do business with Deer Fern Farms should exercise extreme caution. In an attempt to keep this posting short I tried not to go into too much details (my credentials/experience, the husbandry provided for our torts, emails from Douglas Dix when I emailed him once they were really sick saying all the pancakes he got from this group came in really skinny and he lost some once they arrived to Deer Fern Farms, etc) but am willing to go into detail if anyone is interested. Thank you all for reading and have a good rest of your day.
I wanted to take a moment to put out a warning to fellow reptile folks about doing business with Deer Fern Farms and Douglas Dix. I purchased two pancake tortoises from him back in January at a reptile expo in Portland. While I should have been more wary of purchasing at an expo my husband and I got excited when we saw four juvenile pancake tortoises since we had been researching and looking into acquiring some. At first glance the Deer Fern Farms stand seemed different from the other ones. There weren’t a lot of hatchlings and the man running the booth wasn’t letting everyone walking by hold all the animals. We should have continued walking by. We talked with the man at the booth (Douglas Dix) for a while about his collection and the four pancakes he had there. Everything seemed to be answered sufficiently and we ended up purchasing two, one male and one female, that we named Maple and John Wayne. After we got them we started noticing things wrong with them and took them to our exotic vet. Our vet in conjunction with two other very well respected exotic veterinarians worked very hard at saving both Maple and John Wayne. They were infested with parasites (coccidian, pinworms, etc) and had had them for a considerable length of time (judge on their overall body composition and blood work). There bodies had been robbed of nutrients and their immune systems were shot and after several rounds of antibiotics (injected and oral), de-wormer, metronidazole, and force feeding with supplementation mixed in Maple lost her battle on June 19th and John Wayne passed a week later. Now being that it is December some may wonder “why now?†and that is a great question. Due to his reputation in many different reptile forums I had thought that maybe just maybe this was an isolated incident and I am not one to want to put a sour note on someone reputation. However this past week I received a message from a vet in Arizona that I used to work with. Again he is a very well respected vet that works with both reptile and avian societies and travels the country to not only attend but speak at various exotic medicine conventions. There recently was the Phoenix Herp Expo where Deer Fern Farms was there selling their reptiles. A client of this vet purchased a pancake tortoise from Deer Fern Farms that he is now treating for a severe case of coccidia and we are all hoping that this tortoise will respond to treatment better than our two did. Being that both this tortoise and ours had similar issues and where sold almost a year apart it leads me to believe that this may be an ongoing issue with this breeder and anyone wanting to do business with Deer Fern Farms should exercise extreme caution. In an attempt to keep this posting short I tried not to go into too much details (my credentials/experience, the husbandry provided for our torts, emails from Douglas Dix when I emailed him once they were really sick saying all the pancakes he got from this group came in really skinny and he lost some once they arrived to Deer Fern Farms, etc) but am willing to go into detail if anyone is interested. Thank you all for reading and have a good rest of your day.
