Where to start...


I added this beautiful male proven breeder Piebald to my collection back in early October. Had him in "quarantine" for 3 weeks. It ate for me twice during this period. Now, I put quarantine in quotation marks because best I can do at the moment is across the room. So yeah, I started pairing some of my other ball pythons & was getting locks in every pairing. I got excited and decided to put the Pied to my het Pied female and what do you know, a got a lock.

The Pied looked healthy as could be, even had a perfect shed in mid November. A day after he shed I offered food and he refused. The day after that I placed him back again with the het Pied hoping for another lock. Instead of a lock, I found both snakes covered in this white porridge like substance that smelled awful, a similar smell to a regurge. I didn't know what snake it had came from, so I cleaned them up, separated them and then a few days later it happened again. It was the Pied. I didn't think much of it at the time, I thought it was just something minor that would take care of itself.

A couple weeks go by, nothing major happened. The Pied would just hang out on the warm side of the tub, hiding under the newspaper. I would just leave him a alone for him to recover. Then just last week, the same white porridge like substance happened...3 days in a row. While cleaning the tub that last time I noticed the Pied's belly was "sucked in" near the cloaca. I decided it was time to see a vet.

So I call in the morning and set up an appointment for later that day. I go into the animal hospital without having done much research about the whole situation. I tell the vet I believe the snake has diarrhea or something along those lines. I explain everything the best I could. From the beginning though, I had my doubts about the vet. He didn't seem familiar with ball pythons, I would even say he seemed a little on the scared side. Now that I think about it, he never actually pulled the entire snake out of the snake bag. I just went along with whatever he said because, well, because he's the Vet and he must know what hes talking about. I should have gone with my gut feeling.

The picture down below shows what they did to the ball python. When I got home I started googling Doxycycline to read up a little bit on it. I could not even find anything regarding Doxycycline & ball pythons. Then just a couple hours after getting home from the vet, the Pied either vomited or peed all the fluids they had injected & then 2 days later the Pied is dead.


So yeah, I'm at a loss. Dont even know what happened. Any opinions? Anything I could have done to have prevented this?