Sand Substrate!

[eyespy]

My friend David the bowel resection specialist says sand is responsible for sending his children to college and buying his beach house.

It's one of the biggest old wives' tales in herping that "proper supplementing" will prevent sand-eating. True cases of pica where animals eat sand to right a nutritional deficiency are very rare. Most animals become impacted from normal daily tongue-flicking and/or eating and have totally normal serum levels of minerals and electrolytes.

I don't work in the vet clinic anymore but am still offered between 5 and 20 impacted animals every week for my rescue. Sand impactions happen frequently and most people who say they never had a problem with sand are totally shocked when we do an epigastric lavage and they see how much stuff has built up in the digestive tract of an animal they think is perfectly fine.

I have not yet seen an animal kept on sand that didn't have an unacceptable amount in its system and most animals kept on sand live a significantly shortened life because all the sand in their guts interferes with proper food absorption, so they basically starve to death.