Originally Posted by Pterolykus
Always happy to try to help people identify animals' illnesses as early as possible. Luckily this process let me identify my baby boa's RI before there was any visible mucus, any wheezing, any gaping of the mouth, etc. The only symptom at the time was a very quiet click that the doctor had to quiet the room to hear (even with his scope) a small amount of mucus in the mouth once opened, and inconsistent eating which could have been a large number of factors (she was a new to us, pretty underweight baby).
My process is primarily developed from volunteering in wildlife rehab. For wildlife, I do as much of the check as is possible without touching the animal (with some deletions and additions based on species - birds will have some different signs than reptiles, etc), unless I already have to pick up an animal to move it, in which case I might do anything additional that wouldn't add handling time. The additional checks that do require handling I do for my snakes because they are meant to be handled eventually and won't be harmed by a minute or two. Animals that really shouldn't be handled in general, like if you had a particularly delicate snake species (hatchling gtp?, others), I'd just look as much as I can (i.e. if it happens to be crawling on something, I'd try to look at it's cloaca then and stare at it until either it happened to be visible or the animal was bothered or went to hide) unless a problem was identified and go from there.
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