My advice is set aside a few hundred dollars before anything else as "Medical Expenses". With 4 animals if all the bins with aspen in it got animals, I would advise $1000 just in case. Reptile Vets are not cheap. I had to take my beardie to the vet who somehow got RI even though I keep her perfect and wash my hands with Chlorhexadine and soap before I touch each of my animals and it ran me $250. I had a full check up done including blood work, a mouth culture, lung check to make sure it wasn't pneumonia and baytril. But that gives you an idea. And RIs are hard to kick and take time. Reptile lungs are not like mammals and they cant really filter mucus like mammals. It took my beardie 2 rounds of baytril to knock it down. Snakes seem to get hit harder by RI than beardies or it seems that way to me. Maybe its the slower metabolism. Regardless, like I said, set aside at least $500 for medical expenses, quarantine the sick snake out of that rack and wash and disinfect your hands whenever you touch anything to do with the sick snake. Also water, feed, clean the healthy animals first and do the sick animal last so you avoid chances of infecting others. It also depends if the RI is bacterial or virus. My beardie had enterobacteria which is pretty common and found on anything like rocks, dirt etc. the vet told me it is spread through fecal to oral and since beardies love to lick stuff...go figure. A virus could b air born which could wreck a collection. So first thing is get a culture to find out if its bacterial or viral and make sure to tell the vet you have other animals and how the RI is spread so you can avoid infecting others. Anyways, I know a snake and bearded dragon are different but the advice I'm giving applies to any type of animal.
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