Never Feed Wild Crickets to your Pet
It’s natural to see a juicy-looking bug outside and think “I bet my bearded dragon would love that”. In the wild, you’re probably right. Leopard geckos, bearded dragons, and other meat eaters love to hunt prey. But it’s important to remember one key thing: nature is full of danger, and that’s why we do everything we can to keep our pets safe and healthy.
That’s why you should never feed wild insects to your pet. Unlike store-bought, or home-bred insects, wild insects can be dangerous for a couple reasons. In this article, we’ll discuss the dangers of wild insects and how to keep your pets healthy and safe in captivity.
The Dangers of Wild Insects
On paper, it makes sense to think that your pet should be able to eat wild insects. After all, they would be eating them in the wild all the time, right?
But it’s not that simple. We often forget that wild insects are usually full of parasites and prone to disease. Wild reptiles aren’t immune to these issues- most of the time, they just live with them. This is reflected in their life expectancy. Sources widely suggest that wild bearded dragons will live between four and ten years.
But in captivity, beardies can live up to 18 years. The reason is simple: you give them a stress-free habitat without disease, parasites, competition, and malnutrition.
Just about everything we do for our pets is intended to increase the length and quality of their lives. It’s why we clean their enclosures, why we take their diets so seriously, and why we spend so much time tweaking their habitats to keep them happy.
So in reality, the opposite is true. You should never feed anything to your pet if you can’t directly confirm that it’s safe to eat. Giving wild insects to your pet opens a major window for health problems and even death.
These are the main reasons wild insects aren’t safe:
Parasites
The biggest and most obvious problem with wild insects is that they carry parasites. In crickets, one of the main parasites to look out for are nematodes. Nematodes are a group of parasitic worms that are very common in the wild. They’re found in the soil, and can easily infect crickets.
In fact, if you raise crickets in your house, nematodes are one of the main things you need to watch out for. We have an entire article about preventing cricket disease in an at-home colony, but the key point is to keep your crickets’ enclosure clean.
If you do accidentally feed crickets with nematodes to your bearded dragon, they can cause intestinal issues like diarrhea, decreased appetite, weight loss, and vomiting. Nematodes are treatable with drugs, but the contributing factors can take a serious toll on your pet's health.
But that’s just one very specific example. With wild insects, you never know what you might be getting. There are tens of thousands of insect parasites, and it’s impossible to know what might happen if your pet ingests one.
So, to reiterate: the simplest solution is not to feed wild insects to your pet!
Pesticides
The next health problem is less obvious. Wild insects typically feed on domestic plants, which are routinely covered with pesticides, fertilizers, and other heavy-duty synthetic chemicals that have no place in your pet’s body.
Pesticides are poisons, plain and simple. If your pet ingests some that is circulating in a wild insect, it will almost definitely hurt them in unpredictable ways. Fertilizers can be just as bad.
Diseases
Last, wild insects get sick just like every other kind of animal. When you raise insects in your house or buy them from a store, you can supervise their health yourself. That doesn’t mean you can absolutely avoid your feeders getting sick, but if they do, you can prevent your pet from eating them.
Crickets are prone to a whole host of diseases, some of which can be passed on to reptile pets. Wild insects are even less predictable. We have a good understanding of the health issues that brown house crickets can have because they’re commonly used as feeders.
But the random insects you see outside might be completely mysterious to science. What we mean here is that you have no idea of knowing what kind of diseases a wild insect might have, or how they could affect your pet if they were to be passed on to them.
Any pet owner’s worst nightmare is having their pet come down with a mysterious condition that the vet can’t treat.
So for the final time: the solution is simple. Do not ever feed wild insects to your pet!
Low Nutritional Value
Some people have romantic ideas about feeding wild insects to their pets; that wild insects are more natural, healthier, or might give their pet something they can’t get in their normal diet. But this is completely untrue. In fact, wild insects have lower nutritional value overall.
That’s because when you raise insects in captivity, you can control their diet, and ensure they get everything they need to be healthy for your pet. You can even gut load them for extra nutritional content and increase their calcium content with dietary supplements.
Wild insects, by comparison, eat whatever they can get; usually grass and leaves, which are low in nutritional value. And there’s no way they’re eating as well as a colony of home-raised crickets on a substrate of oats or bran.
Never Feed Wild Insects to your Pet
So beyond the potential health risks, there are no benefits to feeding your pet wild insects. Store-bought, or home-raised feeders like superworms, crickets, and dubia roaches are by far the superior option.
They are not only significantly healthier than wild insects, they have much less risk of transmitting a disease to your pet. They are also almost guaranteed to be free of parasites and absolutely free of poisonous chemicals like pesticides.
In short, there is nothing to debate. There is no clear benefit to feeding wild insects to your pet, and very clear, dangerous risks. It’s a no-brainer: use feeders instead!