Rainbow Boas and Mite Spray Dangers

[purplemuffin]

Okay, this has to do with my experiences and I just haven't seen any information on this online so I figured I should post this.

It's basically about the cause of death of our rainbow boa. It's..hard for me to type, because it basically was my fault.. I wish I had listened to my boyfriend, but at the same time, I wish there was more information out about this particular problem.

The whole story:
When the NARBC came to texas we purchased a baby brazilian rainbow boa from Bryan Hummel. She was great and perfect and healthy and we were thrilled to have our dream snake finally in our collection! When we got home, however, we discovered we picked up mites somewhere during the convention. We emailed Hummel to tell him we came home with mites to tell him to watch out in case whoever gave them to us touched him/his animals as well. He didn't have any, so that was good.

So, we asked our herp friends what to do, they said to get mite spray and start treating the snake soon. Anyway, we planned on purchasing prevent a mite, but until then used the natural chemistry mite spray as it was the only thing in our area. This is where my stupidity comes in. Nathan told me he was nervous about using any chemicals as the animal was young(4 months I think?), but I was stupid and told him to do it anyway. We were careful, we didn't spray directly on the animal, we just basically used it to clean the cage. Even after that we would rinse the cage out to prevent the chemicals from messing with the snake. We also used the spray as little as possible, as the bottle says not to use it for more than three day intervals. I think we did it on 1 or 2 day intervals, just rinsing with water on the days between.

Things appeared to be fine, the snake acted normal, she ate for us.. even pooped for us on the day we got her home. But then, less than a week after the purchase, she was dead.

I told the breeder what happened and that his snake was sadly dead. We got an email from Bryan Hummel who said that rainbow boas are completely sensitive to mite spray more than any reptile and that we should not have done any treatment on the mites other than purchasing mite predators to eat them. He never uses mite spray for his boas, just the predatory mites.


After this I felt horribly guilty, I had caused the early death of our snake we had dreamed of for years and years, our sweet little baby Dorothy. I wish I had asked him directly, but mites seemed like such a common problem, and in fact I had even known someone who used the very same mite spray I used on her rainbow boa and had no bad effects.. but of course her rainbow boa was an adult.


I just wanted to ask if this is just something everybody knew about but just..never put online anywhere? I've been looking on all different websites, caresheets, mite pages, breeder sites..I've never seen anyone mention it. However, now I have spoken to another breeder besides Bryan who claims to have heard of this problem. But then on his website care page it makes no mention of it in the mite section.

I don't know, I guess I want to know if more people have heard of this. I feel absolutely ashamed of myself even now, and I want to prevent this feeling from happening to anyone else. I know I can't make up for what happened.. But maybe I can stop it from happening to someone else... So I want to get this information out there about what happened to me. Even if it's hard to admit..

So..be careful guys...