boa, I've heard that line from 1985 to present when somebody does finally get an animal that dies from impaction. Did you know there are 2 types of impaction? Acute is when a clump of sand blocks off the entire plumbing and sudden death occurs. But chronic impaction is the more insidious kind and can not be accurately diagnosed without slitting the bowel open. That is the type of impaction most commonly found with playsand.
This occurs when sand sticks to the wet walls of the intestines and forms a coating. The animal loses the ability to absorb nutrients through the affected areas and slowly starves to death. Sometimes the tissue underneath the sand dies off and the animal goes septic and dies suddenly. If there is no necrosis, it can take upwards of 3 years for death to occur.
Most vets, even in necropsy, blame this sort of death on parasites or failure to thrive and never slit the bowel open to see if there is a sand coating. It's a very highly underdiagnosed problem.
Nicola, in the wild they DO NOT live on loose sand. It's sand mixed with soil that bakes into a hard crust, not dunes like the beach or the Sahara. Australian beardie keepers use bricklayer's sand with a high clay content to simulate their natural environment, they never use fine grained sand as that coats the intestines too easily. Beardie keepers who do use sand are regularly fined by
Wet your hand and bury it in sand. Does the sand cling? Can you shake it off easily? Probably not. Then that's what's happening inside the beardie's gut. Intestines are not smooth like sausage casings. They have millions of villi, fingerlike projections which absorb nutrients. Picture a coral reef with lots of sea anemones. That's what the gut is like. Sand clings all over those structures.
I've spent countless hours in the OR holding 3 feet of dying small intestine while the surgeon tried to find enough healthy tissue to justify keeping chronic impacted beardies alive. Almost all of them end up being euthanized because there just isn't enough functioning bowel left.
I bought this 5 week old beardie from a breeder that uses washed playsand. Having seen what I have, my vet and I did a gastric lavage to flush out the intestines thorougly and the vial is full of sand, bile salts and other digestive chemicals that were removed from her. It was almost 20% of her body weight after just 5 short weeks of being on sand. She would have been dead inside of 5 years had we not removed the sand:
<img src="http://www.thebeardedlady.org/images/sand.jpg">
The Special Species Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania where I used to work loses about 5 to 7 bearded dragons weekly from complications of chronic impaction.