New Member, Huge Fan of the BOI, Long-time fan of colubrids
Hi all!
I'm new here, obviously. I've adored snakes since forever. I liked them almost as much as I liked horses as a teenaged girl. And you know about girls and horses. I've had Honduran Milks for years, though my baby recently passed on. I'm looking into a Japanese rat or more likely a rhino rat. My current enclosure is perfect for a semi-arboreal, I'm making sure I get the right animal for a temperate zone. Exo-terra X-Large doesn't make for good tropical level temperature control as I would like. I don't live in the tropics, after all.
I run bio-active enclosures and have for years. And no, I don't feed in the cage. Unlike the wild, which bioactive mimics, there's not enough room in a home enclosure for the animal to move around freely enough to resolve any impaction issues.
My son is a bigger herp fan than I am. He's not a member, but he's more into lizards (his first was a Beardie that passed on from old age) and he's got a crocodile skink now. She's adorable. He's not very creative with names, though. Or guessing sex. "He" laid an egg. Likely it's a dud, but since breeding isn't on the agenda, we don't care about sexing the animals.
I discovered Fauna when my trusted pet store guy couldn't source a Japanese rat for me and suggested certain online retail and classified outlets. He doesn't flip animals; if he can't get a wholesale animal, he refers people to other places that can. I found a few places and doing my due diligence led me to the BOI, which has been an amazing resource. You can't fully trust things like google reviews or yelp because personal experiences, good or bad, are so laden with emotional reactions that a lot of things are missing. The BOI here, however, does an awesome job of nitpicking, especially bad reviews, to get a better understanding of what went on in a way that isn't a they said/they said battle. The BOI really helped me select the place I'll be purchasing my colubrid from once my vivarium is fully established. Someone in one of the really long threads said that it's not the good transactions that show the character of the seller (or buyer) but how the seller acts when a transaction goes bad. Which is very true.
So, I just wanted to say howdy and to let anyone who wants to read this that the BOI is made of Awesome.
|