Yeah, that's why I tried to offer actual evidence and data. These aren't opinion questions, but many people treat them as if they are, like taking a survey of which Ben and Jerry's flavor is the best. In the worst of these sorts of cases, suggesting not to provide UVB elicits circular ad homenem attacks ("you just don't care about your animal's health, so what do you know anyway").Originally Posted by Harri
There are in these sorts of questions reasonable appeals to authority -- for that I'd recommend looking at, say, Mader's Reptile and Amphibian Medicine and Surgery, where they point out that whole prey carnivore diets are nutritionally complete, and where they point out that hypocalcemia in rodent eating snakes is virtually unheard of. But this isn't a real appeal to authority anyway, since the text links to published studies and case reports. These are facts that are based on evidence, and can (and may someday) be disproven only with more evidence.
I don't run any 12" T5HOs, but I do run a number of 24-48" T5HOs in different applications, and all of them are definite potential burn hazards. They are also, more seriously, break hazards; if a snake gets a nose behind the lamp and pushes, that lamp will shatter into ten thousand pieces of death, many of which could enter heat pits and mouth. There is no way I would put even an unplugged bare flo lamp in a snake enclosure. There is very simply no reason to do so.
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