2 years ago I went down to Iowa to hang out with Anthony. We had been acquaintances in the hobby when I first started out and he had been an online advisor/friend as I dealt with the virus and the loss of my original collection. Fast forward to 2011, I had just adopted a new pet ball python after being out of the hobby a few years. Anthony randomly contacted me out of the blue to say hello and see how I was doing. We chatted and texted over 3-4 months and he encouraged me to get back into ball pythons, and we talked about all the new morphs and combos that I had missed since I left. He invited me to come check out his collection and hang out for a few days, since he only lived about 5 hours away. I will admit, through talking we kind of liked each other and at that point, he was a nice guy. So I went down to meet him and stayed at his house. I was planning on spending much of the trip helping out and cleaning things, organizing, help him weed stuff out as he had said he had way too much stuff and was way too disorganized, and I figured my OCD for labeling and organizing might come in handy. Plus I greatly missed having a collection of my own and thought it would be really cool to check out some of the awesome stuff he had. Ihad expected him to have a facility similar to many of the other "Big Guys" in the hobby, but when I got there, I found out otherwise.
His snakes are kept in a 1920's style farmhouse that is 3-4 miles away from his main house. The building has limited insulation and no temperature control, and lightbulbs hanging from long exposed wiring.Racks upon racks are crammed against every wall and into every corner, many of which are hard to access. Most of the tubs had moisture build up as well as multiple piles of old feces and urates collected inside. Many had no water in their bowls and some had no paper or substrate of any kind. When Anthony opened some juvenile tubs to show me a few, he found a dead young female that he never knew had passed away. As I went through looking at the racks and asked him about the animals in them, some of them were ones he'd had for 3-4 years yet were only 700-800g. He said he was "too focused on his main moneymaker projects and potion/crystal stuff, and didn't have time for many of the others".I opened a tub to see one of his group of G-Stripes, and ended up having to pick double layers of stuck shed off a beautiful adult female. In the next rack over, I found a female wrapped around eggs that he never knew was gravid or even remembered breeding. It was a nightmare and nothing like what I would have expected from him.
However, what really got to me were his dogs. Anthony has American bulldogs, and only one lived with him at his main house, his favorite. 2-3 were kept in small outside kennel runs that had no water or real shelter, and almost every inch of floor was covered in mud and feces. The dogs' nails were overgrown almost into their paw pads, and they had bug bites and wounds all over their bodies. The whole time I was there, they never left these kennels.
Now here's where I really got upset. His other 2 dogs were kept inside the snakehouse, inside metal wire crates that they can't even turn around in. He let them out to eat and go potty once, maybe twice per day for about 5 minutes. Then they'd go right back into the crate, even while we were there for 3-4 hours working on stuff. They lived in those crates. I left after 4 days, and the entire time I was there, they never left their crates.
I didn't say anything until now because quite frankly, he is very unstable and scares me. When I got home and later told him that I felt we should just stay friends, he went off his hinges. It was so bad that he was even messaging my ex-boyfriend. We had to block him on Facebook. He would call my phone 30 times in a row for days, texting me and insulting me and threatening me. Anthony has admitted publicly on various forums that he had been diagnosed with bi-polar disorder, which he also told me about as well as a few other issues. While I was visiting him, Isaw him go from happy and excited to angry and violent within the blink of an eye over an email he received, cussing and throwing things, and this was the night before I decided to leave. He has some major issues and I didn't want to risk setting him off by being public about what I saw. But I have had this on my conscience for the last 2 years, and every time he has commented on a post of mine on a group or something, I've wanted to post it. Now after seeing Dan's picture of how those animals were packaged and shipped, I had to say something.
Anthony may have changed the way he keeps and cares for his animals within the last 2 years, but after what I saw, I sincerely doubt it. Both while I was there and after I went home, I said something to him about the dogs. He immediately argued with me and belittled me, so I don't see him changing any time soon.
