For me Josh it's because they are snakes and not dogs. Snakes tend to have a slower reaction to a lot of things...illnesses, stressors, that sort of thing. I like to watch them closely at first, make sure we have a consistent feeding pattern set down, monitor those defecations, etc. plus go through at least one or two cycles of time to make sure mites cannot possibly hatch. I've never seen a mite in the collection and I'm pretty darned determined I never will (I hate, hate, HATE any type of bug!)

They way I look at it in the end is it's 90 days, 3 whole short months, relatively a blink of the eye in the greater scheme of things. Maybe it's too long, who knows. I just know that skipping QT can create for me and Mike a much longer, more difficult issue if something does go wrong so I figure why rush this or pretty much anything else to do with these snakes.

The last thing is I always check things against my own level of experience. Compared to many I'm still a newb, a few short years in this hobby, a growing but still smaller collection. When I consider any change from my "norm" I balance it immediately against that experience and make sure I'm never getting over-confident or cocky. I consider a lot of steps I do as simply protecting myself against my own stupidity LOL. It's easy to get overexcited and start taking short cuts that probably shouldn't be taken unless one has years upon years of working with a large number of these gorgeous creatures.