Newsgroups: rec.pets.herp

In rec.pets.herp, remcat@athena.mit.edu (Rachel Emily Molenaar) writes:

> PROBLEM ONE:
> Gee, uh, I've had Madison since October and I am starting to feel like a real
> fool/evil bad snake person 'cause poor Madison STILL WON'T EAT!!!  ....
> ...
> 
> Right now, I am planning on trying gerbils, since she has refused mice, but I
> would like confirmation first on whether or not this is likely to work. 
> (Transporting rodents back and forth from the pet store isn't exactly my 
> idea of "fun.") Specifically it would be nice to have stories from people
>  who managed to successfully feed their Balls. Size-wise Madison is about 
> four feet long, under two inches diameter at biggest.
>
OK. My Ball was about the same size, and took and estimated 9 months before
it started eating. I tried all combinations of live, stunned, and dead
mice and rats in every designer color I could find. Finally I tried a
pre-killed gerbil (put it in a double plastic bag, sqeeze out the air,
and swing it hard to the floor...). I put the gerbil in the cage and
it was gone in the morning. Other important factors are tempurature
(The floor tempurature on my warm end was 87-90, and the air tempurature
was about 78), humidity (keep it fairly damp (~70%)). I also kept the
cage fairly dark (by covering up the sides with cardboard), and I stopped
handling the snake at all, except with cleaning the insides of the cage.
Once the snake began eating it would eat anything with 4 legs and a tail.
In three months it consumed 60 mice/fuzzy rats.

> PROBLEM TWO:
> ... the Boston area?  ...
>  
Sorry. I'm in Colorado....
  

> PROBLEM THREE:
> Could someone once-and-for-all tell me how hot her cage should be? ....

Mid/upper 70's for the cool end, mid/upper 80's (floor temp) for the 
warm end. A nightime drop is OK as well.

> PROBLEM FOUR:
> I recently found (ICK!) little ticks under some of her scales after reading
> about such parasites in a otherwise fairly useless snake book. The book
> didn't give any suggestions on what to do, so I used tweezers to dislodge
> the gross little things and them crushed them. There are no signs of 
> infection or anything, but it would be nice to do the proper thing 
> (in general) and also to know where they came from and how to prevent
>  recurrances.

I think you normally put a drop of rubbing alcohol on the ticks first, and
then pull them out with tweezers.

From the descriptions of your problems it sounds like you have an imported
snake. I would therefore suggest you have it checked for internal parasites
as well. Since the snake is not eating you will have a hard time getting
a stool sample. You might want to get it dewormed now. I had mine dewormed
with both a paste and an injectable dewormer, and still found parasites
in it's stool after it had started eating. Five more home treatments of 
paste dewormer finally cleaned them up.

> Thanks much in advance; what a great newsgroup!
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Regards,

Dave           (daver@hpgrrd.gr.hp.com)