Yes vets go to school for years for this sort of thing( I am in the process as we speak), and as the person above me said they decide where to draw the line of what they will and wont do based on their opinion...in that school they get told to draw the line at a certain point, a point that they decide for themselves based on their years of schooling. How is their years of schooling more validated than years of seeing, breeding and working with these animals?

Ideally Ralph would have had a surgical suite attached to his snake room whisked the little one in there documented from start to finish his entire clean up, sterilization, and wound closure and made a public service announcement saying that this had a risk of septicemia, infection, dehession and various other complications and had his DVM.

How ever what he did was fairly similar to what would have been done if a vet would have agreed to complete it for him ( and when you first saw that wound, that would have been a BIG IF). They would have cleaned the wound, put what they needed to back inside and stitched her up. Yes they would have worn gloves and had an operating room, but the actual procedure is the same thing.

I still say he did the right thing and that the choice he made was far better than just culling the little thing without giving it a chance, and just look at her now.. an gly tummy but a wonderful looking snake!

sorry for the rant.