I work at Petsmart and every now and then we get a little corn snake baby that won't eat. This time it is a little snow corn. He arrived on 8/6 and has never had a meal. He is getting thinner everyday and finally he was taken to the vet last week. I had told my manager that the snake needed to be force fed or tube-fed. The only thing the vet did was prescribe metronidazole and instructed us to give the snake .1ml of it every day. They also told us to feed smaller sized pinkies. Our pinkies for store use come in bags of 50 and most of the pinkies are a few days old so are not all that tiny. I did find one pinkie out of the whole bag that was small enough but even after putting the pinkie in to the snake's throat, he would not swallow it down.
So on Saturday I took a pinkie and cut it up into a paste, mixed it with a little water and with a little work I was able to syringe feed the little corn .1ml of the pinkie "soup". I'm not sure how fast he would have digested this (since it was a paste) but on Sunday evening I did find a small amount of poop (two dots worth) and some urates in the corner of his enclosure. (He's on paper towels so we can keep track) On Sunday I repeated the process and was able to get him to eat .15ml of pinkie "soup". I weighed him after his meal and he is 5g. How often should I feed him his soup?
We already lost one corn snake to this kind of thing (starved to death) and I'm tired of my co-workers and management not stepping up and getting the animals what they need so I'm kind of taking things into my own hands here. Any advice on helping this little snake survive and grow would be great. I'd hate to see him follow the same path as the other one who died. My pet care manager will not allow me to bring in tube feeding supplies as the force feeding and tube feeding should only be done by veterinarian (well the vets are stupid) but if I'm using what we have on hand I don't think its against the rules. The syringe goes back into his throat a bit, so I'm not getting any in his windpipe.