It seems as though we both have strong convictions on the matter :P

I'm not old enough to have 40 years of experience under my belt. However, I've got about twelve years of heavy reptile keeping to go by. The only animals I've had develop any sort of problem were either rescues or injured/orphaned wildlife. Because these is the ONLY problems that I have encountered, the only conclusion that I can come to is that I must be doing something right.

The truth is that neither of us are testing our ways on very delicate animals though. The most delicate animal in your possession is your box turtle, and you haven't had it very long. And while I've cared for hard-to-keep animals via my rehabilitation volunteer work, I've not kept them in my own home. I do know that the majority of people who keep high-experience reptiles don't keep them in the same way that the average Joe keeps a ball python.

I'm sorry if I implied that your cages were dirty, but to me it sounded... uh... not clean. You said that you don't disinfect your water bowls or your cage very often, and with this last post you included that you don't remove all bedding once it has been soiled and peed on. I know that my burm doesn't pass just clumps of urates when she does "#1", she expells a lot of liquid along with it. When I was at my local petstore (that focuses only on reptiles and fish) I saw an 18 foot burm and she was not at all shy about "letting it gush". I just don't see how you could "spot clean" when a good portion of the lower layer of bedding would be soaked in snake pee. It's not the great wild, and there is at most a few inches of bedding to absorb it. As for good bacteria... things don't get expelled from our bodies because they are GOOD for us.

Oh, how I wish that were true. Can you explain to me where IBD, the adenovirus, and many other diseases common today were 40 years ago? I can tell you were they were not.

Keepers today tend to have larger concentrations of animals and more species sharing the same general area, which is a easy way to cross contaminate animals. Most likely these things existed, but we didn't know as much about them.
I can say that people today are keeping animal species that they could only dream of successfully keeping 40 years ago. With more and better knowledge, we can breed animals in captivity that we couldn't 40 years ago. Nobody advanced by just sticking with what they had been doing all along, you see?

The ball python was in an aquarium that hadn't been cleaned in over a year. A year's worth of feces & urates this snake was laying in. It was pitiful and stunk worse than my rat cages have ever thought about stinkin'. No scale rot, no mouth rot, no mites, no RI, even though it had the typical screen top. Hmmmmmmm. How could that be? Maybe because it was at least being fed & heated? Maybe it was actually as healthy as it appeared to be? Hmmmmmmm

I seriously don't think that you should bring up a story that illustrates to possible new snake keepers that they can neglect their animal all they want and nothing bad will come from it. It is hard for me to believe that a person would neglect such things as cleaning a CLEARLY dirty cage, but still keep up on feeding properly and monitoring temperature levels. That doesn't make sense at all. That's as far as I'm going to elaborate on my opinion on such a story.

"No offense, but if you had to use your water bowl frequently for soaking/defecating, your owner most likely has an illegitimate (screen) top for the aquarium you're being kept in. What kind of top do you have for the aquarium that your burm's soaking in?
You do realize that most of the time that's a sign of low humidity, which needs a large water dish as a bandaid."

I did take offense at that comment, which probably put a damper my mood when it came to replying to the rest of your post. First off, I didn't say frequently. If your burms never soak in their bowls then you have either some freaky burms or you simply don't watch them enough.... or they don't have big enough bowls to soak in. I've spent a good $300 on temperature and humidity monitoring devices for that cage alone. My humidity is PERFECT, my temperatures are PERFECT, and I make sure they are multiple times a day (or maybe that's trivial?) My girl sometimes poops in her bowl, then again so do my other snakes and my plated lizard. I've done enough research to know that it is natural. As for a top, sorry, don't have one. The roof of my cage is solid and it opens from the front. When she was younger I had her in a 55 gallon with a screen top, and I used aluminum sheeting to cover all but a fourth of it. According to my two digital humidity cages and 2 temperature gauges, I was able to maintain proper gradients in that cage too.... there are ways to modify almost anything to make sure it works properly.

As for fish, I do gravel-vac my tank once a week. I remove about 25% of the water each time. I've got a filter that is over-rated for my tank by about 30 gallons. My oldest fish is around nine years old. "Big Spotty Fish" is quite impressive, I should see if I can get a picture of him once my camera is fixed

I have to go shortly, but you wanted a list of my experience. I have been responsible for these animals, mostly in the rhelm of rescue/placements or wildlife rehabilitation... I'm sure I will miss a few, but oh well... (oh, and by the way, it is much more difficult to take an animal that is already sick and return it to health then it is to start with healthy animals, so just keep that in mind)...

Burmese pythons
Corn snakes
Ball Pythons
Leopard Geckos
Fish
Rabbits
Dogs
Cats
Gerbils
Rats
Hamsters
Guinea Pigs
Ferrets
Carpet Pythons
House Geckos
Green Anoles
Brown Anoles
Green Grass Snakes
Black-lined plated lizards
Long-Tail Grass lizards
jacksons chameleons
vieled chameleons
American Toads
Fire Bellied Toads
fowler's toads
Green Tree Frogs
Gray Tree Frogs
Savannah monitors
Kingsnakes
Pacmans
Millipedes (assorted)
Green Iguanas
Green Water Dragons
Blue-tailed skinks
Three-toed box turtles
Common Snapping Turtles
Alligator Snapping Turtles
Red-eared Sliders
Eqyptian Uromastyx
Mali Uromastyx
Somali Uromastyx
Narrow-Mouth Toad (painted)
Australian Whites Tree Frog
Bearded Dragons
Skunk Geckos
Various Newts and Salamanders
Chinchillas
Opossums
Squirrels
Racoons
Flying Squirrels
Tons of different wild bird species
Armadillos
Rat snakes
Rattlesnakes
Various Bats
Bear cubs
Chickens
Conures
Parakeets
Cockatiels
Finches
Cockatoos
Canaries
Horses
Cattle
Pigs
Turkies
Guineas

and I know I am missing more, but hey, I think you get the picture. I've worked at six differnt wildlife rehabilitation centers, dozens of domestic animal shelters, and am a certified animal rehabilitator. I do not support breeding unless you can better the species or breed with the outcome, so I have only bred a few species.

That said, I've got college midterms coming up and I've got to study.














-----
~Sara~
4 Leopard Geckos
4 ball pythons
1.0 Black-lined plated lizard (Lizzy Butt)
0.1 Burmese Python (Pixil)
5 Rats
6 Mice
1.1 Gerbils
1.1 Dogs (Ozzie and Mandy)
0.1 Cat (Isis)
0.0.1 Synodontis Catfish (Big Spotty Fish)
0.1 Convict Cichlid
0.0.1 blood parrot cichlid
0.0.1 African Featherfin Catfish

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