RI Question

[Coluber42]

Interestingly enough my vet doesn't do cultures unless the client specifically asks; he pushes both injected baytril and fortaz instead. His reasoning is that the culture is more expensive than the meds, the vast majority of RI's will respond to one or the other, and people with less valuable snakes won't bring them to the vet if a RI costs $300-350 to treat instead of $150 - they will just let the snake die and get another one.

That’s a shame. For a few reasons - one, because it would be nice to think that animals are worth more to their owners than their purchase price. But also because that sounds like a recipe for transmissible diseases propagating farther before anyone knows what’s happening; and because automatically dosing with antibiotics when you don’t know if they’ll help is a great way to breed resistant strains. I get it that not everyone is going to pay for the culture, but it seems like vets should at least encourage it. Surely there are people who would be willing to pay for it, but either don’t know to ask or assume that if the vet doesn’t mention it first there’s no reason to ask.