Hi guys! First post here, long time lurker.
I've always loved snakes, and have been researching ball pythons for the last few months and was planning on getting one at the Reptile expo in Pomona in January.

However, two days ago, I went onto Petfinder on a whim and looked to see if there were any snakes in my area. I saw that my local shelter had two ball pythons and two red tail boas (at least they look like red tails, could be BCI's or some other type). From the one blurry picture of the snakes they looked like they were in really poor condition, so I decided to go to the shelter and check them out.

When I got to the shelter, they were WAY worse than I had imagined they would be, and there were five snakes, not four. Three boas and two ball pythons. They were kept in large metal kennels just like the ones the cats are kept in, except with glass doors instead of wire ones.

They didn't have any sort of heating element, except for the five and a half foot long and three foot long boa, which were kept together, had a CHE in their kennel... Right on the floor of the kennel, uncovered so that the snakes could slither right onto it and burn themselves. One ball python had a little log hide, but the other snakes had nothing.

They were all COLD when I picked them up, really skinny, their spines looked sunken in, their skin was wrinkled as if they were dehydrated, and three of them were covered in pieces of left over sheds, and two had stuck on eye caps. The biggest boa and the little one housed with it were wheezing and had mucous coming out of their nostrils... Sounded like a respiratory trac inflection to me. They looked AWFUL. I handled all of the snakes, and they all felt cold. The room felt dry, even to me!

I'm definitely going to adopt one of them rather than buy a snake at the expo, but I can't take all five. I don't really know how to choose which one to adopt, either. Anyone in the LA area that can take one of them? I'm going to be contacting local reptile rescues to see if they can take them in, these guys really need help.

I attached a pic that I took of one of the boas, should have taken more but I was too saddened by their condition to think clearly. The sad part is, this was the best looking snake there. The smallest BP was in the worst shape, it was really difficult to see this kind of neglect. I know it's just a lack of funding, but it was still just awful.