What's best way to remove stuck eyecap??

[jphealy]

I've soaked for an hour yesterday and today to deal with some retained shed. That's all gone now except for his left eyecap. I tried letting him wriggle out of a damp towel but it hasn't worked.

Should I soak again tomorrow and try the wriggle thing again? Is there anything else I can do? Should I be soaking anyway for just an eyecap?

[Adam_Wysocki]

With the amount of damage that can be done to the eye if you don't have experience removing eye caps manually, I'd suggest that you just wait until the next shed ... it will most likely come off then.

Otherwise you can continue to soak for about an hour a night ... sooner or later it will work itself loose.

I've seen ball pythons with eyes literally ripped out by people trying to take off stuck eye caps ... it's really not worth it.

-adam

[frankykeno]

That's exactly the advice Adam gave us over the phone when we had a snake with a stuck eyecap and he was bang on. We left it, worked hard to make sure her husbandry was perfect humidity wise for her next shed and everything slipped off slick as goose doo doo, including that stuck cap.


~~Jo~~

[Brandon.O]

I think you will be fine if you try to get it off, i have a snake that i adopted from a redcue facility and she had a stuck eyecap that i didnt notice until about 3 days after i bought her home, i decided to wait for the next shed and when she shed, another eyecap got stuck on,

so......what i did was, bumped up the humidity in her tank for about 3-4 days, then i took her out and got a moistened Q-tip.I held her and put the q-tip on her eye VERY gently rubbing it between my fingers over her eye a couple times in a rolling/twisting motion and then both of the eyecaps came off.

[jphealy]

I'm in the process of switching to plastic caging to sort out my humidity, so hopefully that will work out ok.

The only thing I'm not sure about with my plastic tub is the ambient temps. The room temp can get as low as high 60's. I'm planning on using 2 heat mats, one under each end, with a thermostat on each. It's a shallow tub - only about 6" - so do you think the heat mats would be enough to raise the ambient temps to an acceptable level?