Giving Bad/Incorrect Advice

[Daigga]

I'll give my experience being someone who's relatively new to keeping pythons (coming up on a year? Time really does fly)

As a starry-eyed new keeper, I mostly kept to posting pictures, asking questions, and chiming in on opinion-related threads whenever I actually posted, but stalked basically every topic I could otherwise. Knowledge is power, right? Eventually I got to take part in discussions on more sensitive topics, and help talk to people even newer to the hobby than myself, and I'll be 100% honest on this part; some experienced keepers are downright mean to noobs looking for advice. I saw it happen on a green iguana forum I would post to way back in the day, and it's always a shame to see it happen anywhere.

The situation is something like this;
A person buys a python on impulse or just doesn't do enough research before getting one. They post questions while admitting what seems to anyone who's owned bp's for more than a month to be glaring husbandry issues (heat rock, lack of thermostat, underfeeding, overhandling, the list goes on). As experienced keepers, it should be the responsibility of everyone here to correct those mistakes (because that person just doesn't know. They here asking questions, not bragging about mistreatment after all), however it should be done in a constructive way where the newer keeper learns. What so many people seem to do is chide that new keeper for buying a snake without being totally prepared, and some even go so far as to instruct them to take the snake back or accuse them of outright abuse (rare and usually not worded that way). This doesn't help the new owner, it doesn't help the snake, and this approach is just going to chase that person away from the forums and not inspire any husbandry changes.

I'm no longer a part of that iguana forum, nor do I have any desire to ever get another iguana and a huge chunk of that is because of the overwhelming amount of users there that called me a terrible owner. (I had posted asking a question about a newer animal while mentioning my roommate teasing my older iguana. My iguana was at my parents house while I lived in a new apartment, but people took that as I got rid of my iguana because my roommate didn't like it and therefore didn't deserve a new animal, even though the animal I was asking about wasn't even mine...) I always think the goal of forums should be to coach and try to inspire the warm and fuzzies about our cool and scalies, not to berate. Remember this before you criticize any new keepers enthusiasm; we were all new once, we all made mistakes, and most of the new members "parroting" information are repeating what we were told by most of you. Newer keepers like myself really look up to most of you, and we're trying our best to be like you guys. Have a little patience with us as we try to get there.