Do you run fecals on your animals?

[Dwagon]

John-The book I use is Exotic Animal Medicine for the Veterinary Technician ISBN:9780813822068 (http://www.amazon.com/Exotic-Animal-...=9780813822068). I ordered several books from Amazon, but this one seems to be the best out of all of them. I am also a veterinary technician and it is really not a hard process to learn how to do fecal floats, I showed my husband a few times how to do it and he does it on a regular basis now without any problems. The microscope I use is the Celestron 44340 LCD Digital LDM Biological Microscope, this microscope has an LCD display (which I need because I can not see through a regular microscope after I had lasic because it is hard to focus close up) and also has the ability to take pictures and record small films, the light bulbs however are kinda crappy so I would suggest you order a few extra. You are able to download these images and films to your computer. (http://www.amazon.com/Celestron-4434...rds=microscope)

Do you run fecals on your animals?
I personally know the Veterinarian that we take our fecal samples too (I worked with him for awhile when he was doing an internship at the ER clinic I worked at) and he does not make me bring the animals in, he knows that I do not want to possibly expose my collection to something that may have been in the Vets office. You can find directions for fecal floats online and also how to make the fecasol from Epsom salt (this is really an inexpensive way). Regular IDEXX does not usually isolate the specific bugs and what species they are from, so we send ours out to Canada and the price is about $112 for this. We only do this if we see something in our fecal float from a new snake we have purchased and we keep strict quarantine procedures with rubber gloves, bleaching tubs etc. You can always take one animal in and pay the fee the first time and just submit future fecals under the same animal and should not have to take the snake in with the poop you drop off. You can always explain to the vet about the concerns you have with bringing your animals in because if you were to pick something up at the vet you could potentially expose all of your animals and it would be a HUGE financial loss to you. Many times Veterinarians will also teach you how to give your snake injections for RI infections and also show you how to tube feed de-worming medications like Panacur so you can do it at home.

I personally do not like how casual some people are about just selling an animal without checking for internal parasites before selling them. We have received a few animals from top of the line breeders that came to us appearing healthy and a few weeks later we had to euthanize them because they had two types of infections and were not responding to the dangerous Genamyacin we had to use. This is not a way to run a business and the negligence on the breeders part is unacceptable in my opinion. Ignorance is not OK in my book, especially when we recently received an animal that was positive for a dangerous internal parasite and told the breeder they sent out a sick animal, and the breeder is not willing to treat their collection and now are knowingly selling infected animals to other people. When the breeders response to us was to just send the animal back so he can resell it too someone else, it is also not OK. So we as the buyers are now in a position that if we really want the animal, we have to now treat it, which we are willing to do, but the seller not believing in veterinary care, and not willing to refund the medical costs is not OK in my book.