My love, my snakes

Snakes really are becoming my life. I love everything about them. They amaze me. They are the best pets ever. To be honest, now that I have snakes, it's really hard to own anything else. Even though I love my dog, he's a pain in the butt compared to the snakes. They don't shed hair everywhere, they don't chew up my stuff, they don't really do anything out of spite or maliciousness, they are quiet and are really easy keepers. On top of that, they provide me with all the affection and love a cat would, without the mess or the smell.

Snakes are so much more intelligent than people give them credit for too. They think, feel, have likes and dislikes. I've even seen a snake hold a grudge before and they pick and choose who they like and don't like. They have a great judge of character. Despite what people say, snakes do socially interact with each other. I've witnessed it with my own two eyes.

To be honest, I wish people gave these animals more of a chance. They are unfairly judged. People call them "slimy" and "gross"... snakes, in general, are probably cleaner than your mouth and are far from slimy (except maybe anacondas). They are endearing, affectionate, intelligent creatures, each with their own personalities. They are just severely misunderstood. People who, upon hearing I have snakes, scrunch their faces and declare how "disgusting" it is piss me off. Most of those people have never even been in the same room as a snake.

What people don't seem to understand is that humans are not born with a fear of snakes. They are socialized to have a fear of snakes. People who live in an area where there are more venomous snakes in the wild are raised to have more of a fear of them than people who live in places with more non-venomous snakes. However, what I've noticed is that there are people out there who believe that ALL snakes are venomous. I've even been asked if my boa CONSTRICTORS have been "de-fanged"... or if I'm afraid I'm going to be bitten. If I was afraid my snakes were going to kill me, I wouldn't be walking around with them around my neck! Seriously people, use some logic! There are just a lot of severely misinformed people out there. It makes me sad. These animals don't deserve the bad-rap they've been given.

Feeding Day...

It always impresses me how aware the snakes are of their surroundings... usually. Don't get me wrong, there are some days and times when they can sleep so soundly you can poke and prod them all you want and they will just push you off, cover their eyes, and go back to sleep. But there is one thing that will catch the attention of even the heaviest sleeping snake - feeding day.

At this point I am pretty sure the snakes count the days between regular meals as they seem to have a unified "poo" the day before they get fed. If shedding, many of them seem to try to finish shedding before the scheduled feeding day since we don't feed if the snakes are shedding.

Once, even, we were not planning on feeding Kiseki because he was in shed, but before the last snake got their rat, he was already peeling back his head piece and rushing through his shed. I don't think I've ever seen a snake shed quite so quickly before or since.

I guess I should probably mention that the reason I am blathering about feeding day is because yesterday we fed all of our snakelings.

The snakes usually know something's up because we clean all the cages and check everyone to do a head count before we thaw the rats. If more than one bin opens up in that room, you can guarantee that at least two of the snakes in that room will take notice... Shiva and Quetzalcoatl (although Shiva usually takes notice of people in the room whether it's feeding day or not). Rest assured, Quetzalcoatl's nose pokes out from under his paper and he starts flicking his tongue. It usually isn't long before he's got his nose pressed against the glass and he's watching our every movement... or more specifically Dave's every movement, as Dave is usually the one who brings the rats into the room.

I am always interested to see each snake's feeding behavior, as some of them have very distinct mannerisms. Quetzalcoatl, when hungry, strikes hard but has poor aim. His little albino eyes just don't see very well. When not quite as hungry, or in a particularly lazy mood, he will simply open his mouth and gently take the rat from your hand.

Some of the snakes expect you to just drop the carcass in and go away - like our little Rose. She's not a people snake and she would much rather just eat off the floor of the cage than have a rat dangled for her... and usually Carnival prefers this as well.

Shiva, on the other hand, seems to enjoy the "thrill of the hunt" and you can often find him constructing "caves" out of newspaper inconspicuously (in his opinion) placed next to the water bowl. After all, eventually prey will have to come to get a drink. Last night, he had this such design going for him and it was quite interesting to watch his behavior. We dropped the rat into his cage (we feed frozen thaw so they are already dead) and he sniffed it, grabbed it by the back, and drug it into his newspaper "cave".

At any rate, I guess most people don't realize that snakes all have different feeding behavior. I really need to start taking video of my odd-ball-eaters. :)

It's been a while...

I realize I haven't written in this blog for a couple of years now. Moving and work and life in general has gotten in the way of me keeping up with things. At any rate, I would like to revive this blog. However, I will not be writing much more about my past as a beginner snake keeper except occasional mention where needed.

Instead, I would like to write more about what I have learned, observed, and experienced more recently. After all, my babysnake Shiva is no longer a baby. I have also since probed Shiva myself and discovered that my vet apparently did not know how to properly sex a snake. Shiva, unfortunately, went three years of his life being referred to as a "she". Ironically enough, he acts the most masculine of all my snakes - perhaps to prove to the world that he is in fact a male, despite his past as a "female".

Realistically, he knew the truth all along, it was us stupid humans that had a heck of a time readjusting ourselves from referring to him with "he" instead of "she". As far as his temperament and behavior goes, he hasn't changed in the five years I've had him. Shiva is still a curiosity driven, adventurous snake with a lot of intelligence and ambition. My husband says he is "the dumbest snake we own", but only because Shiva's antics drive him nuts.

Dave hates the fact that Shiva consistently rearranges his cage to suit himself, including, but not limited to balling up all of the newspaper and laying on it, dumping his water bowl so he can lay in a soaking wet cage while shedding, and making paper "caves" for himself. Shiva has also recently taken to "cleaning" his own cage whenever he messes. Before, where it was dropped, there it lay. Now he pushes everything to the hot side of his cage where it can quickly dry out, and therefore not stink up his cage too badly. The downside to this is that we end up spending extra time trying to scrape and scrub the urates and poo that end up being dried to the bottom and corners of the cage.

Despite his antics, I love Shiva to death. He is very gentle and personable; content to rest on my shoulders while I walk around. Shiva still begs to be taken out, often the first one to greet me when I walk into the snake room. He might be a plain old normal, $75 snake to some people, but he is worth the world to me. I wouldn't trade him for anything. Who knew that a snake could be so special?

Respiratory Infection!

Ever since I brought Shiva home in October, she'd been making odd popping noises every once in a while when she was working really hard to climb. Naturally, since snakes are prone to Respiratory Infections, I took her to the vet.

Originally, I took her to the vet at Banfield Vet Clinic (part of Petsmart) since they told me they did reptiles. They gave her a series of three Betrol(sp?) shots over a few weeks, and the popping seemed to minimize, if not disappear. However, one night in March she took a turn for the worse.

I had settled down with Shiva curled up on my chest to watch a movie. Suddenly, I found myself wet and sticky and smelling a horrible smell that was similar to canned mushrooms. At first, I thought that Shiva had maybe regurged on me... that was until I turned on the lights to see her blowing bubbles out of her nose. I was about to put her back in her cage so I could do some research to see if there was anything I could do at 11:00 at night when I saw a lump form in her throat. I rubbed it towards her mouth and a mass ammount of sticky mucous poured out of her mouth.

Instead of putting her back in her cage, I took a towel and layed it in my lap and let her coil up in my lap while I went online to find help. All of the vet clinics that handled reptiles were closed. There was an emergency animal hospital open at night, but they didn't handle reptiles at all. I ended up turning to my trusty friend, David.

He advised me to clean out her cage entirely of substrate (I was using cocoanut mulch at the time) and get as much humidity out as possible. He also reccomended that I use paper towels for the time being in her cage for bedding instead. So I set Shiva up on the couch with a blanket to curl up in and went to work cleaning her cage out. When I was done, I put the hydrometer back inside and the readings for humidity were still a little high, so I curled up with Shiva on the couch and there we slept, curled up together until morning.

Poor little Shiva looked miserable when I woke up. I rubbed her throat again to make sure there was no more mucous and instantly called the vet and set up an emergency appointment. I heated up some rice in a sock and put it in a box with Shiva's baby blanket and packed her up for the drive.

Shiva seemed to be feeling a little better by the time we got to the vet. Unfortunately, we ended up sitting in an absolutely freezing waiting room for a while... and then an even colder examination room (with the air conditioning blowing). But the vet gave Shiva a physical and told me that if I hadn't said that she was blowing bubbles the previous night, he'd think she was a perfectly healthy snake. He perscribed some other medication that starts with a C (but I don't remember what it was called at the momment) and showed me how to give her shots every other day.


When we went to check out we found the office visit bill was $75 and the medication was $50! Whooo... pricey. The nurse handed the medication to me and said "Be sure you give her the shot in the shoulder muscle of one of her forearms." I couldn't help but stare at her and raise an eyebrow. "Arms? She doesn't have any arms." The nurse looked bewildered. "She doesn't have arms?!" "She's a snake." "..... Oh.... right..."

Anyway, Shiva was really good about getting her shots, although I could tell that after a month of them she was starting to get a little annoyed by getting stuck with a needle. Needless to say, Shiva has fully recovered and hasn't had any rebouts of her RI.

After this whole incident, however, I switched all my bedding to newspaper and I don't worry about humidity levels unless the snakes are shedding. I also ditched Shiva's humid-hide.

What I learned:

• Newspaper bedding is better than substrate - substrate holds too much moisture, mold, and dust particles that can aggrivate a snake's respiratory system.
• Betrol isn't very strong - find a vet that knows what they're doing
• Humidity can do more harm than good and snakes with high-humidity environments are more prone to Respiratory Infections... but don't let the snake get too dry because that can cause other problems. But a good rule of thumb is that as long as they are in a cage that is not an open-screen top you only need to spray the cages durring sheds and not any other time.
• Snake mucous smells like canned mushrooms.
  

Feeding Boxes...

As a new snake owner, I was open to the advice that any experienced snake handlers could give me. One such piece of advice, however, I learned was not necessarily a practical practice. This was regarding the subject of feeding boxes.

The general theory behind feeding boxes is that a person would feed their snake inside the feeding box instead of in its cage so as the snake would not associate the cage opening with food and attack its owner by mistake. It made sense enough to me, so I gave it a try.

Unfortunately, the feeding box method proved to present me with two new challenges - aggressive or odd behavior inside the feeding boxes and that it was highly discouraged to "handle" a snake after it had eaten (especially boa constrictors because it could cause them to regurgitate their meal) and there was no way to get the snake back from the feeding box and into its enclosure without handling it.

Now, I had been using the "feeding box" method with Shiva for a good three months before Quetzalcoatl came to live with me. For Shiva, I took the lid of an old paper box and sat her inside and fed her there. It worked fine for a while but over time several issues began to arise.

One of these issues was that it was as if Shiva wanted me to assist her in eating. She had taken her rats back or butt first a couple of times (makes swallowing very very difficult) and after that, she would bite and constrict her food, and then drop it and look back and forth between me and the rat until I pointed to the nose of the rat. As soon as I had pointed to the nose of the rat she would dart her head over and take it down head first. After a few weeks of this odd behavior, she would take the head of the rat in her mouth, slither over to me and press it against my leg to help her swallow faster by allowing her to take bigger bites.

This behavior struck me as very very odd, and very unnatural, so I would dangle her rats until she bit and constricted and then I would leave the kitchen (I always fed her on the kitchen floor). That was when Shiva began to bite, constrict, and then drag the rat into the living room. All of this became such a headache to me, I finally just started giving her food inside her enclosure. Generally, I would just get her attention with the rat and then lay it down (on a paper towel so as to keep substrate off of it) inside the cage and she just ate off the floor of the cage with no problems. All other problems with feeding her ceased instantly. Yay for feeding inside the cage!

In Quetzalcoatl's case, I used Shiva's traveling box (a Sterillite tub with a handle for carrying in the top) as his feeding box. Everything went generally smoothe with him for a while. I would drop him in, close the lid, and the instant that lid opened up again he was in feeding response and would viciously and violently strike his food (hissing madly as he did) and then I would close the lid again and wait for him to swallow.

The problem I had then, however, was that he was still in feeding mode when I would open the lid again to get him out. I had to tap him on the head with a long spoon to get him out of feeding mode before I could pick him up and put him back in his feeding box. Because of this, around the same time I stopped using the feeding box for Shiva, I stopped using it for Quetzalcoatl as well.

The result of discontinuing the use of feeding boxes is that neither of my snakes were cage or food agressive (as I had been told they would be if I fed them in the cages), I finally had the peace of mind that I didn't have to handle them after meals, and they both ate off the floor of their cages consistantly. In fact, neither snake has shown more than an occasional, once every three or so month, agressive feeding response since the switch to feeding inside the cages. However, I do take my snakes out to slither around, to have their cages cleaned, etc. Therefore, they don't associate the cage opening with food.

(Videos: Quetzalcoatl in the feed box)

Enter Quetzalcoatl!

It was a cold, blistery Tuesday morning in January. I awoke bright and early, eager with anticipation, and made my way to the main office of my apartment complex. "Jackie?" I said. "If a package arrives for me, can you call me on my cellphone right away? I'm waiting for a baby snake." "A snake?! Well... of course we'll let you know right away!" I returned to my apartment and waited... and waited... time seemed to drag.

Finally, at around 10:00 a.m. the phone rang. My baby had arrived! My heart pounded in my chest as I ran down to the office to retrieve the tiny package. The box was marked "Perishable" (I'll say!) and had all sorts of arrows and care warnings all over it. I rushed it up to my apartment, carefully cut the box open, pried up the Styrofoam insulation, and dug through crumpled up newspaper to find the tiny cloth bag that held the precious snakeling inside.

I slowly opened the bag and peered inside to see two beautiful red eyes looking back at me. His tiny pink tongue flicked as he sat virtually motionless for several minutes before the tiny albino stretched his head up to look out of the bag he had traveled in. He was absolutely gorgeous! Pictures had not done him any justice at all.

As I was placing him into his enclosure, I felt his stomach was empty and hollow as if he hadn't eaten in a long time and his tummy gurgled as he slithered from my hands. He hadn't been in his enclosure for more than 10 minutes when he started hissing at me and mouth-displaying.

Despite what many people had told me about giving a new snake a break-in period before attempting to feed it, my new baby, Quetzalcoatl seemed very hungry (I figured that one of the main reasons he was grumpy, besides not knowing me, was that he hadn't been fed). I thawed him out a rat pup and offered it to him. He took it instantly! Bitten and constricted! He sucked that thing down like a kid eating gummy bears.

When he was finishing swallowing, I noticed that a piece of his substrate had gotten into his mouth. I was afraid he might ingest it, so I used a pair of chopsticks to pick the piece of wood from his mouth as he yawned to realign his jaw. It was probably a bad mood, because he was instantly angry with me. He hissed and struck at me a couple of times before I closed his tub for the night.

Over time, I sat next to Quetzalcoatl's cage and occasionally stroked him while he hissed angrily at me. I did this several times a day, every day until he had fully calmed down because I did not want him to learn that a little bit of moodiness would get him his way. Over the two weeks Quetzalcoatl transformed from a scared, vocal, and seemingly aggressive snakeling to probably one of the most tame, docile, and lovable snakes I have ever met.

(Photos: First: Quetzalcoatl in his bag in the lap of one of my dolls, Second & Third: Quetzalcoatl in his new enclosure

Adding to the Family...

One day, while reading the posts on the forum I frequented, I noticed some ads for snakes for sale at the bottom of the page. What caught my eye was a beautiful baby albino boa constrictor. He was gorgeous! Absolutely gorgeous... and $1000 worth of gorgeous. Could I justify spending $1000 on a snake? Maybe. After all, I did justify spending $500+ on dolls. But where would I get the money? I only had about half that... I could save it up over a month, but the snake might be gone by then.

The baby albino was all I could think or talk about for many days, and finally, my boyfriend (at the time) told me to go ahead and buy the boa and he would pay for half. So I contacted the seller and he agreed to let me send him a down payment of half and send him the other half a week later (when my boyfriend was supposed to get the money to me).

Excited, Shiva and I went to the pet store (and Target) to get the heat, housing and substrate for the new snake. We picked up a 105 gallon Sterilite tub, ZooMed Jungle Bedding, a blue baby blanket (Shiva had a green one) to use as a hide, a large water dish that looked like a stone, ZooMed Under Tank Heater, and Shiva picked out a climbing tree (I let her slither to the one she liked). We brought everything back home and drilled holes in the tub and set up the new cage.

A week passed and my boyfriend never gave me the money. When I asked about it, he argued with me and told me that he wasn't going to give me the money because he never had any intention of actually paying for half of the snake. PANIC! I instantly contacted the seller of the albino snake and asked him to give me more time. He agreed to give me a few more weeks and the majority of my following paycheck went to paying the rest of the money for the snake.

Yet another week passed after the final payment was sent and no word, no contacts, no e-mails, and no snake. Finally, I called the seller as he wasn't returning my e-mails asked about the snake. "Oh, I didn't want to send him without knowing someone would be there to pick him up." So arrangements were made for my new baby to arrive the following Tuesday and thus began the long, 4-day wait.

(Photos: First: Shiva checking out Quetzalcoatl's profile on his 'for-sale' page. Second: Shiva inspecting the new enclosure.)