how long do you quarenteen

Keeping your baby away from the others? How long do you do it?

30-90 days in a separate room is the norm for quarantine.

But-be extra careful when adding a boa constrictor to an established collection. Inclusion Body Disease can hide undetected in a boa for months-even years! And it is quickly fatal to balls and other pythons.

I've been wrestling with this issue-I'd like to add a new male to my long-term 1.2 group of Guyana redtail boas. But I dare not because I can't determine a safe quarantine period from the (so far) available info on IBD. I have no idea what the boa people are doing when it comes to adding new blood to their collections. What a nightmare.

Brad Chambers

i quarantine all new animals for sixty days minimum. I feel this is a reasonable amount of time for most purchases. If any new animal is questionable, i would recommend an even longer quarantine just to be safe.

3-6 months on average

Our normal quarantine is 3 months but that's not a hard and fast rule. If a snake just doesn't feel right to us, is having any feeding issues, etc. then it just stays in QT. If any new snakes are added into QT, the clock restarts on any snake already there.

Because we occasionally have done rescues and do snake "sit" for some people and have a mixed collection of pythons, boas and a colubrid we keep them all seperated and we are very anal about rules. QT is upstairs in a corner of our large master bedroom, the established collection of ball pythons have their own closed room on another floor, the boas and the milksnake are kept in our livingroom. Any snake in quarantine upstairs never leaves that room and is not handled by visitors or any of our children.

When we feed or handle it's ball pythons first, boas and milksnake second, quarantined snakes always last. These may seem to be overly strict rules to some. For us it's meant no spread of disease ever, no mites ever *knock wood*. We're still relatively new to keeping a good number of snakes but as my granny always said...."start as you mean to go on". :)

I was going to ask about the quarintine too. My friend is giving me her baby ball (about a year now, end of 06 baby) as she is no longer able to care for it. Once I got back up to school and I get him from her, I was going to take him to a herp vet get him checked out and make sure he is healthy. He's fed fine as long as she's had him, and her snake is the reason I got mine.

My question is, If the vet says he's healthy should I still wait the 30-90 days?

I really don't have anywhere in another room to put him. My apartment isn't that big and my roommate is terrified of snakes.

Unless the vet does a blood/fecal/bodily fluid/external/internal/loop-dee-loop inspection of everything, it is still wise to quarantine for at least 2-3 months.

Vets are not the absolute, they cannot tell if an animal is internally sick or a carrier of anything just from a basic inspection, which is generally what they do.

Tell your roommate to get over it. They are freaking harmless - ball pythons don't sneak up to you in the middle of the night and eat you! :-)

My grandmother thinks I'm a bad mother for allowing her grandchildren to have snakes. LOL!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by JenH

Tell your roommate to get over it. They are freaking harmless - ball pythons don't sneak up to you in the middle of the night and eat you! :-)

LOL!

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Unless you are a rodent, then all bets are off!