RI? How? Why? seriously confused

[satomi325]

I've heard of vitamin injections from a companion animal vet. But I've never had a specialized reptile vet offer it to me when a rescue I took in had RI.

I would keep declining. If your snake ever got to the point of emaciation, then I would suggest tube feeding, which is safer than assist feeding.

I could be totally wrong here, but sometimes I think that it's possible to be too fussy about all of this stuff. As in sometimes, (and believe me I am guilty of it myself), people take the cleaning and adjusting temps and humidity and just generally fussing about the overall ball python housing and environment so much that it ends up becoming more detrimental to the snake than helpful. We all try so hard to get everything "perfect" for the snake when maybe at some point we need to simply not be so anal about it, get things to what would be considered a comfortable and nominally healthy state, and just let things be.

A good example is when both me and my dad had fish tanks at the same time. I was absolutely obsessive about keeping the water perfect and doing everything by the book etc. My dad did nothing. Seriously he did no water tests. no cleaning. heck he didn't even hardly ever change the filters, he just let the thing do whatever. And while I struggled to keep everything perfect I also struggled to keep any fish alive for more than a couple of weeks, and he never lost one fish. He had that tank for years and the fish grew huge and were just about the healthiest fish I had ever seen, if I could actually see them through the muck.

Anyways, before everyone jumps to conclusions and assumes i'm out of my mind and giving bad advice, i'm in no way suggesting to not make every attempt to have the proper set-up for our snakes, i'm just saying that maybe we go overboard sometimes and get so carried away with trying to get things "perfect", that it might be doing more harm than good. Just a thought.

I think ball pythons are pretty hardy animals. I believe they can do well in a stable range of reasonable temps and humidity. However, I still think we should give them stable optimum conditions. Some snakes change their habits from the smallest change in temp or whatever else. For example, many of my hatchlings won't feed above 88-89 degrees. Anything above or below and they stop feeding.

And added stress on a snake increases the chance of RI. Their immune system is lowered and directly related to their stress. So leaving conditions to stray away from ideal usually does stress out a snake. Especially if it fluctuates a lot.

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