After going to the Student Union, Shannon and I decided to stop by our college's Life Sciences building, where they keep several herps and invertebrates. On the first floor they have 8 cages on display, 6 of them containing different species of hots native to our area, on one of a Texas Rat snake. These included Western Diamondbacks, Timber Rattlers, pigmy rattlesnakes, two Copperheads, and a venemous snake native to Japan that's a relative to the Cotton Mouth here in the US. Every now and then we always try to stop by the classroom that's next to it in hopes of finding someone who takes care of them so we could talk about their behavior patterns, and such. Well, we went there today, and I personally was disgusted by the shape that their environments were in. Each enclosure had urates/feces and old shed laying around the cages, and there was no water at all in any of the vivs. There were water bowls, but they were bone dry. Needless to say, we wrote a little note. I really didn't go into the shape that the enclosures were in when i wrote the note, because I really didn't want to get a negative response, or no response at all. I also mentioned that I had owned several reptiles before hand, so it wouldn't come off as the whole steriotype of "Oh, they're just college kids looking for some sick amusement". But honestly...no water? I can somewhat understand not wanting to clean out a hot's cage, but there are safe ways to do so with under-handled animals. But imo NO water is absolutely unacceptable. I'm going back tomorrow to take some pics to post up here, because they really are amazing and beautiful animals, but their enclosures just tick me off!