Quote Originally Posted by Duncanleosteus View Post
I wish that vet would've taken cultures and been more knowledgeable. I didn't want things to get so bad so quickly. I hope this never happens again to any of my animals.
Unfortunately, there's very very few vets that are competent at care of herps... even the so called herp-specialists. Best case is that they are able to provide the same level of care that you can do yourself. There are exceptions...some well known rockstars in the herp world... but you would have to be lucky enough to live near one of these guys.

My advice is to learn how to everything you possibly can yourself and you will be able to provide top-notch for your animals in a more rapid manner. I'm more versed on this with bearded dragons than ball pythons but a good quality microscope and enough fecal test kits and medication to treat 15 bearded dragons is the same cost as a single vet visit and 99% of that is the one-time microscope cost. You can easily swab your own cultures too and purchase virtually any medication you need yourself. I've tried several different herp-specialist vets at several different practices over the years before realizing they actually know very little.