evansnakes said:
One thing that is a huge knock against the sector of the hobby that works with venomous and it really makes me angry as well, is that the fact that it really does seem to attract a bunch of people who are barely semi literate, act and talk like small children and post garbage on threads like this.
I think that a lot of people are keeping venomous snakes for the wrong reasons. This hobby does tend to attract the "thrill seeking" type of individual who is often poorly equipped to work with these animals on the competent professional level that is really required to keep them safely. These are the people who after getting caught with illegal venomous snakes decide to play with illegal pipe bombs and make even more bad press for herpers. We are not all like that, but there are far too many people who are.
All this said, Bud is really not a bad guy in my personal opinion. He says and does things I don't always agree with, but he takes very good care of his animals and has ethical consideration for their welfare. He doesn't write very well, but he's a lot calmer and smarter in person than he comes off sounding like on the Net. I'm sorry he doesn't express himself very well and as a consequence tends to alienate a lot of people.
I force fed this animal 2 times, small frozen thawed pinkies, I was very careful and the animal completely digested both and had a bowel movement after the second. I have force fed hundreds of baby snakes and this one was very good about it. It is just frustrating force feeding baby rattlers due to the position of the fangs and the relative size of the animal as you try to feed it.
Did you get a fecal exam?
I have two techniques for assisting young pygmies or similarly configured vipers. One involves full-body immobilizing it between two soft foam pads and introducing a soft rubber catheter tube into its mouth using short forceps to guide the tube and to verify correct placement (not in the glottis). That works well for the smallest neonates. I prefer not to assist feed neonates whole prey as their tissues are so delicate and easily stretched or torn. A calculated volume of liquid food through an appropriately sized soft catheter is less of a risk. If the animal moves suddenly during this procedure even in a short range of motion, damage is more likely around a whole prey item and a rigid insertion device than from a flexible soft catheter.
The other method involves an isoflurane chamber, and I'm quite likely to use that one on adult pygs. Really obstreporous individuals who are a high risk for extreme stress or self injury on conscious restraint are humanely sedated prior to any veterinary procedure. It is somewhat difficult to use allometric dose scaling accurately for animals of very low body weight, but the advantage of an iso chamber is that it is self-metering and the size of the animal is not relevant to the drug concentration.
The risk to the handler is lowered when sedation is used, but that should not be the primary factor in making the decision to apply chemical restraint. In many cases sedation is simply the most humane thing to do for the patient. Many viperid snakes are particularly susceptible to biomechanical injury when force is applied against their range of motion - eg, when they violently struggle under restraint. In short, if the patient gets in even one good thrash, you can have a potentially serious injury. Some other species show harmful physiological and behavioral effects in response to stress (eg, king cobras). If humane sedation is not used, the patient is at much greater health risk from the procedure. Full body immobilization (eg, with foam pads) can help reduce the risk of biomechanical injury but may increase stress.
Please keep in mind, all thois being said, this entire time my friend was sending emails to the seller asking for help, informing him of the problems and still to this day he has never responded once. As soon as he got paid he was done with this transaction.
If this is true, he does not appear to have much concern for the welfare of the animals he sells. I would like to see the dealer address this issue specifically.
Obviously I don't know what happened here. I think there is always a possibility of biomechanical injury as well as severe immunodepression when you assist feed pygmies under conscious restraint. But this risk is lessened considerably with an experienced handler using proper techniques. The fact that the animal was not feeding for you does strongly suggest (but does not prove conclusively) that it had not voluntarily eaten rodents under its former circumstances.
A necropsy would go a long way towards figuring out what was really the case with this animal. Do you still have it in the freezer? A frozen specimen won't give you a lot of information, but you can still get some picture of its gross pathology. Specifically, was any intraceolomic fat present at the time of death? If this was totally absent on an older animal, I would not be willing to believe that it had been feeding regularly at the time of shipping. Why not unzip and take a look?
