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.)

Building a Relationship

The most important thing you can do with any pet, no matter what kind, is to build a relationship. Most people seem to have this general opinion that snakes are an animal that you can not build a relationship with. It's almost as though most people believe snakes are like fish; mindless, thoughtless, lumps of flesh you feed and put on display. How wrong those people are!

Like people, cats, and dogs, every individual snake has its own unique personality. They have likes, dislikes, fears, and favorite foods. They recognize their handlers and learn to either like or dislike them. They have body language that a person can learn to read if they are willing to be open minded enough to listen. Despite what the common belief is, a person can build a relationship with a snake.

For Shiva and me, I took a route highly discouraged by most experienced herpetologists. Shiva came everywhere with me when the weather allowed for it, or if I had appropriate heat pads with me. She would coil up in my hair like a scrunchy and rest her head either on the top of my ear or right in the middle of my head. Sometimes she would coil around my neck like a necklace and observe from there. Other times she would slide herself into my purse and peek out at the surroundings. I even took her with me to my "The Fantastic in East Asia" class on movie day.

Shiva came with me when I visited my parents for Christmas that year. I blasted the heat in the car and she perched on the rear-view mirror and looked out the window at the world as it flew by. The whole time she was calm and relaxed. I set up a small Sterilitte container at my parent's house with under tank heating (UTH) for the weekend. Most snake people told me that things such as this would stress out my snake, yet Shiva even ate while we were visiting my family, while my whole family watched even (stressed snakes are known to refuse food).

Needless to say, I admit that while my actions to take Shiva everywhere with me may have been foolish, may have caused her some potentially unnecessary stress, Shiva seemed the better for it. She was less jumpy, less scared, and she saw the world from the safety of my arms and therefore was not phased by going outdoors or seeing new people. It became obvious as the months passed that Shiva grew to trust me. Ultimately, I believe that the difference between a socialized animal and a sheltered animal is the same, no matter what species.

(Photo: Shiva visiting me at work [brought in by my ex], coiled around my Ipod and checking out the security cameras)

The Little Things...

Now, I found that as a new snake owner I couldn't help but become obsessed with the welfare of my snakeling. Not that it's a bad thing to be obsessed with the welfare of my baby, but I did what most new snake owners do - I checked the heat and humidity of my cage constantly. I found that a glass screen-topped cage was very very difficult to keep heat and humidity in (especially humidity) and so I misted down my baby's cage several times a day.

Unfortunately, misting alone was not enough. The lid let too much moisture escape. I followed someone's suggestion to place a damp towel on top of the cage and cover half the top with tin-foil to hold the moisture in, and it helped a little, but not much.

Regardless of my obsessive misting of Shiva's cage, her first shed with me was an absolute mess. She managed to get the head piece off but patches of her body still had shed stuck all over. I filled a bowl with warm water and placed her in it to soak and loosen the stuck on skin. I sat with her for an hour, watching TV while she soaked and I gently rubbed the shed off into the water. It took a while, but I eventually managed to get every piece off.

Naturally, after that horrible shed, I went to the forums and asked about what to do to make her next shed easier. "Make her a Humid Hide", they told me. So I ran off to the store, bought some Tupperware and some moss, brought it home, cut a hole in the Tupperware for Shiva to slither in and out of, placed the moss in the bottom, and filled the hide with water. Shiva loved it and after I first showed her the humid hide she spent several hours a day curled up inside of it.

The day before Thanksgiving day, 2006, I was playing with Shiva when I noticed one of her neck scales looked a little strange - shrunken and discolored. Upon further inspection I found that she had about 10 scales total that had a similar shrunken and dry appearance. My first reaction was to panic. My second, call the vet and make an appointment. The vet had no openings that day, and they were closed from Thanksgiving day through the weekend so the soonest I could get Shiva into the vet was Monday. I hoped it would be soon enough and consulted the internet. I found no helpful information on the internet, and nobody on the forum I posted on seemed to have any suggestions, so I turned to The Boa Constrictor Manual.

From reading the listings and descriptions of diseases, the only thing that seemed similar to what I was seeing was Bacterial Dermititis. According to the manual, I should treat the disease with Neosporin. I obsessively slathered Shiva with Neosporin several times a day, and by the time we were able to go to the vet she was already starting to go into shed again and the vet told me she should shed out the skin problem fine since I had caught it while it was in the first stages. Sure enough, Shiva not only had a great shed, but she shed out the dried up scales with no problems at all!

(Photos: Top Right- Shiva in her humid hide, bottom three- the dried patches of scales)

Learning Curve...

I'll be completely honest; the day I brought my beautiful baby snakeling to her new home I knew next to nothing about snakes and snake ownership. I had read a care-sheet I found on the internet and "The Boa Constrictor Manual" that I had picked up from PetSmart and that was the extent of the knowledge I had. Unfortunately, my limited knowledge led to a lot of mistakes in the care I provided. Luckily, I learned from those mistakes.

Now, the day I brought my baby to my boyfriend's place (my apartment wasn't suitable for keeping snakes in due to size and a roommate), I let Shiva climb on this Giraffe statue that stood next to the DVD case for a while before I had to leave for my Korean class.
"You don't have to put Shiva away yet. You can let her climb on the statue for a while." Said my boyfriend.
"Are you sure? Don't fall asleep before putting her back. I don't want her to get lost."
"Don't worry," He assured me "I'll keep an eye on her! She won't get lost."
Two hours later I returned to find him asleep and Shiva MIA. I panicked. I woke up my boyfriend and the two of us searched frantically for Shiva. We finally found her coiled up amongst the DVDs in the DVD case. Relieved, I put her back into her enclosure. Sadly, this would not be the last time snakes were lost due to stupidity.

One day, shortly thereafter, I went to check on Shiva and discovered these odd little white marsh-mellow looking blobs in her cage. I freaked. What in the world were those?! Was my baby sick?! It took many hours of internet research but eventually I found my answer on a forum for snake owners. The little white blobs were Urates (calcified pee) and quite normal and natural for snakes (and lizards and birds). I felt relieved, yet a little dumb. It was obvious to me that I had a lot to learn and a long way to go before I really knew what was going on. In order to help my learning, I joined the internet forum I had found my answer on, and began to post my questions and read as much as I could to learn as much as possible about snakes.

After Shiva's first week with me, I took her to the vet to have her probed to find out if she was really a she or a he. The vet was very kind, and Shiva reacted calmly to him handling her, inspecting her skin and eyes, and even the probing. We left the vet with a clean bill of health and verification that she was a she.

We returned home, and since it had been seven days since she last ate, I defrosted a pinky mouse for her to eat. I placed her in a box that was separate from her enclosure (as had been highly recommended by other snake owners) and offered the pink to her. She refused to eat it. Instantly I turned to the forums - sometimes snakes take a couple of weeks to break into their new home before they will eat. So I waited another week before offering her food again - refused. Distraught, I put her back into her enclosure and waited a couple more days. Finally, I noticed a new behavior! Instead of sitting on the warm side of her cage, Shiva had moved to sitting beside her water dish. This time, instead of taking her out of her cage, I offered her the pinky mouse while she was in "hunting mode" beside her water dish. She took it instantly! Baby Shiva was eating! Oh happy day!

These first couple of weeks I learned a lot about snakes and snake behavior. There was also a lot I should've learned but continued to make mistakes on.
- I should've learned that leaving my snakes out and under the watch of an irresponsible person was a bad idea... but I didn't.
-I did learn, however, that snakes urine hardens into white-yellow clumps called "urates".
-I also learned that some snakes need a break-in period and hungry snakes will move to the "watering hole" and wait for a snack to wander by.

(Photo: Shiva coiled around my neck about a week after she came to live with me)

In the Beginning...

When I was a child I was completely and totally obsessed with reptiles. Dinosaurs were my first interest and I could effectively spell "Tyrannosaurus" before I could correctly spell my middle name. I went from dinosaurs to iguanas, and then I saw it. There at the zoo, coiled up in a beautiful setup, was the most gorgeous animal I had ever seen! A Columbian Red-Tailed Boa Constrictor! It was definitely love at first sight. From that day on I periodically begged my parents to allow me to have a boa constrictor. Sadly, they always told me the same thing; "You can have a boa... when you grow up and move out!"

Years and years went by... no boas... no reptiles... nothing (I did manage to catch a grass snake once but my parents wouldn't let me keep it). Finally, in my 22nd year of life I was blessed with a beautiful baby boa who dramatically changed the course of my life forever. It started when I had just finished my shift at work and was leaving the office for the day. One of my co-workers stopped me with, "You'll never guess what we found in our apartment the other day!" "What?" "A baby red-tailed boa! We're going to take it to the Herpetological Society so it can be adopted out." "Can I have it?" "Sure."

It didn't take long before I had secured a place to keep my new pet (my not-at-the-time ex-boyfriend's house), an old aquarium (from my brother) with a screen top, a water bowl, a half-log hide, an UTH (under tank heater), a ceramic heat light, and a plethora of thermometers and hydrometers. A week from that fateful day I drove to my friend's apartment to pick up the boa.

I walked into my friend's apartment and there she was, perched on my friend's shoulder. It was love at first sight all over again. She slithered from my friend to me and went into my coat and coiled herself tightly around my arm. My friend gave me a small package with the remainder of the pinky mice the boa had been eating and I went to take my new baby, Shiva, to her new home.

That was the beginning of it all, and probably one of the most memorable times of my life.

(above photo: Shiva the day she was brought home)