Haters are going to hate.
If you like that, around that time, I was employed working in several animal houses where animal testing was taking place as part of formal research. Your life expectancy is decades longer thanks to animal research. I would literally be dead if not for animal research, and a significant percentage of the people you know, perhaps including yourself, are in the same boat.
Back at that time there was no recommended dosage. The product was not sold as a reptile treatment. To the best of my knowledge there had never been anything published anywhere about using that product on reptiles. There were no products available which were specifically made for the job.
When no information exists, someone needs to do hands on research. If no one ever did it, we would never know anything. When I first incubated reptile eggs, I'd never read a book about it or seen anything online about it. Not because I was lazy, but because back then we didn't have those resources. Like it or not, if you were going to do anything with reptiles back then you were a pioneer and you were experimenting, because there was no one holding your hand telling you exactly what to do. Over 20 years ago I was one of the people who started writing things up to teach other people about what I'd learned, because back then there was nothing else in writing on some of these subjects.
It must be interesting being so young and naive that you don't have any concept of where the information you gain originally came from. This knowledge didn't just fall from the sky in a book. It would be fascinating to see where you imagine the information I should follow originally came from.
Specifically on this example, I needed to know how much was safe, clearly this is critical knowledge for a reptile keeper with a large collection. The previous product most of us used was Sheltox pest strips designed to be kept in closets etc. They were the go to method for years until they were banned in Australia, and then we were forced to seek an alternative. There's only one way to work out what safe doses are when the only product you have has no available information. I didn't go straight to intense doses, I started with extremely low doses and worked my way up, eventually finding that even when I deliberately dosed them as high as I possibly could there was zero ill effect (oh, the horror of my experiments causing zero detectable ill effect!). The only time there was any problem seemed to be from the mites themselves, because in all cases where there were problems suffered by the animals there were heavy mite loads and none of those cases involved high doses of the chemical (a tiny fraction of what I'd found to be safe in the absence of mites). I never overdosed any animal on the chemical, evidenced by the fact that none of them in experiments ever suffered ill effects, which is obviously required to count as an overdose.
If you don't want to contribute to adding to the world's body of knowledge that's entirely fine, but to be horrified when someone else does so in the only possible way that knowledge can be obtained, is just silly, especially when it's the type of knowledge required for someone in your own position. Your horror is your own problem.
