Exotic Pet Care

Scarlet, a Sick Snake Sneezing
Say that five times fast - I sure got tongue-tied trying to tell the vet that.

Autumn

Turbo

   My husband and I have multiple exotic pets. We have Autumn, who's a red-foot tortoise (pictured left); she's about four years old and has had colds and hookworms. We are currently watching a female red-eared slider named Turbo (pictured right); her shell's about three inches in diameter and we are only pet-sitting her until her owners acquire a more sizable aquarium to house her. We have Uro, an adult male Saharan uromastyx or spiny-tailed lizard. We have an adult Pueblan milk snake named Hannibal. And we have the corn snakes: Diamond who's a corn/rat snake hybrid (the orange one), Sagan who's an anerythristic corn (the gray one), and Scarlet who's a snow corn.

Uro

Hannibal

   Hannibal, who we're pretty sure is male, has never been sick while we've had him and he's never refused food, though he's quite a scaredy snake and likes to thrash around when being held. Diamond and Sagan, both of whom I am quite sure are also male, have never been sick as long as we've had them, though they both went on food strike for a few months a while back (whether because they were too close to Scarlet or because they didn't like the mice, we're not sure, but they're better now). 

   Scarlet, on the other hand, has been sick lately. First, it was sneezing. We read about it, turned up the heat on her, and when she didn't get better on her own, we took her to our exotic pet vet. We determined she needed a bigger water bowl that she couldn't spill like she did the one she had. The vet set us up with a few medicine/vitamin mixture injections, we got her a better water bowl, separated her from the other snakes, and after a week or two it seemed she was doing better for the most part. And the other snakes haven't gotten sick.

Diamond, Sagan, and Scarlet

   I got sick with hay fever, which you can actually have something like the flu from, and left her alone for a few days while I was all achy and fevered and didn't feel like doing anything, let alone playing with the snake. When I got well enough again to watch the pets for a few minutes, I realized she was holding her mouth a little oddly. I got a cotton swab and opened her mouth up to find she had mouth rot. I remembered reading in a corn snake manual that this is fairly easy to take care of usually, so I tried cleaning it out with peroxide. All I did really was make her mouth bleed, I think. My hubby and I discussed it and I took her back to the vet more than a month after her last visit.

   The vet gave us different medicinal injections and I've been consistently cleaning her mouth out with peroxide daily. The day before yesterday, I was able to pick out the second batch of white stuff without her protesting (it pretty much fell out, kind of like a scab falling off). Now the spot where the mouth rot was just looks like a large seeping blister, right where her tongues flicks out from. 

Scarlet's mouthrot, in the beginning

   I'm pretty sure the white stuff being gone is a good thing, but the spot where it was is definitely worrisome. I'm still going to clean it out, but maybe every other day instead of every day, so I don't constantly open up the blister and make things worse. 

   If there's anybody reading this who's experienced this before, please let me know if there's something more I can do to help her get better or to help us prevent this ever happening again. 

Thanks for reading. Feel free to share below what pets you have, and what experiences with their illnesses you'd rather you'd not had.