Any other advice I should give them

[Kroberts10]

A friend I work with son, just got a year old male a couple of weeks ago. They've never had a pet snake before so I've been giving ten some pointers to make things a bit smoother for them. I got to hold him today, and he is in pretty horrible shape but has healed up pretty well from what he's been through. They said he's about a year old and I weighed him at 890 grams. But what concerns me, is that at one point he was on unregulated belly heat and has horrific scaring from a burn. He's missing almost all belly scales from the midpoint to the tail, with the tail past the genitals missing altogether. Wth the scales missing it has left his cloaca exposed. The scarring is bad enough that his lower body is in a permanent curve that he can't straighten. And finally he has been kept pretty dry since all his scales are dimpled along with one eye being wrinkly. They were told by the guy that he has trouble shedding, I can see why with the extreme scarring and being so dry.

After seeing him, I told them to put him in paper towels instead of the jungle substrate they have him on to keep his cloaca from getting infected. Get his humidity up to about 60% and let him rehydrate. And to pick up the digital hygrometer and thermostat from Walmart and to set it on the heat pad for now. They said the heat pad is on a rheostat at its lowest setting but they don't have a hygrometer or a thermometer at the moment. They said they are feeding him live medium rad since that's what the previous ower was feeding him. I told them to closely watch the feeding and keep a pen ready to shove in the rats mouth. Or the method I suggested was to prekill. Then try to get him on frozen and see if he takes it.

Other than being scarred from the burn and dehydrated it seems like he's not doing too bad since he is the size he is a a year old. the scarring looks to be healed up and just looks bad. And he's very docile in the hand.

So is there any other advice I should give them at this point? I'm trying to make sure they have as easy of time getting him acclimated as possible, and getting comfortable with ball pythons too.

Thanks,
Kyle


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[bcr229]

I think you've done what you can do this point. Definitely get the temp gun or IR thermometer ASAP to verify the temperature over the UTH and keep him on paper substrate for the rest of his life. With that scarring I would move to a tub if he isn't in one already, this boy will need higher than normal humidity to shed out the scarred areas.

I would also suggest feeding a small rat every 10 days instead of a medium every two weeks if he won't switch over to frozen/thaw. At under 1000 grams he doesn't really need to be on mediums anyway.