Reptile & Amphibian Forums

This last week the weather was quite cold, even snowing in the Motherlode at my place. Then it got hot the last couple of days, especially down hill where one of my mouse customers lives. He had to go out of town on a family matter and left his animals in the care of some friends. The animals were in a little outbuilding that had been built for them when he had to give up the bedroom aka reptile room in the house for his new baby last fall. With the sudden rise in temperature the little building got too hot and all his reptiles and rats died. He came home to discover this awful event. He now only has a few baby corn snakes and some baby ball pythons, which had still been in the house. 80% of his extensive collection is gone; everything from old pets like his feisty Florida king and expensive ball pythons he had planned to breed to his geckos and bearded dragons. I just feel so bad for him. I also feel bad for his friends, who obviously were caught by surprise by the sudden mini heat wave.

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Bob
Pyromaniac AKA Greatballzofire
Keeping cats allows man to cohabitate with tigers. Keeping reptiles allows man to cohabitate with dinosaurs.

That is very sad and tragic to hear that all those animals perished like that. That is EXACTLY why little out-buildings should be EXTREMELY well insulated in the ceiling AND walls, and even the floors depending on how they are constructed. Otherwise the buildings have to constantly be tweeked by "seat-of-the-pants" methods on any given weather situation that suddenly pops up.

So what about these friends that were "supposed" to be caring for the animals in the building while he was gone???? I'm sure they knew about the sudden warmer weather there?

~Doug
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"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

serpentinespecialties.webs.com

"some are just born to troll and roll"

That's the number one thing, insulation. Typical garages get too hot for that very reason. What I find even more disturbing is that he planned on breeding his ball pythons to the geckos and bearded dragons. Isn't there a point when we take hybrids too far.....But seriously, that's sad and was the result of neglect from the way it sounds. That or ignorance.
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>>That's the number one thing, insulation. Typical garages get too hot for that very reason. What I find even more disturbing is that he planned on breeding his ball pythons to the geckos and bearded dragons. Isn't there a point when we take hybrids too far.....But seriously, that's sad and was the result of neglect from the way it sounds. That or ignorance.
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I wouldn't be too hard on him.....it has happened to me....in an insulated room in my garage....the window unit broke and it reached WELL over 100F for 2.5 days in there....90% of my collection died........

I have precautions now but back then I did not.....
South Texas Summers are brutal....with the humidity it doesn't take long for a cool room to heat up, especially if it has a window as mine did.......

My incident was a case of neglect........I neglected to have a back up system.....
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John Lassiter
Poor planning and procrastination on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part...

I have a feeling that your situation was very different from this one he mentioned. Yours was from a complete mechanical/appliance failure. This other situation sounds more like it was being knowingly heated from the inside of the building because of the extremely cold weather outside. Now good common sense would dictate that if this building is STILL being internally heated from the inside when there is now WAAAY warmer outside weather conditions prevailing, there would be a very serious problem inside the building.

Call me silly, but whoever was supposed to be thinking about the animals inside was probably off doing something else and didn't even give this a second thought.

I don't personally know about any of the details at all, and would like to be very wrong about this. But for a building to stay decent inside with temps, it would have to be heated inside somehow, so when it warms up, any moron would understand it would certainly warm up BIG-TIME inside too over a few day period of the sun beeting down on the building along with the internal heat source still blazing away.

It sounds like this should have never happened to me if the friends ever gave the animals they were supposed to be "caring" for any thought whatsoever. I bet they never gave the animals the first thought when the weather warmed up is what I think....or they would probably all still be alive.

Not trying to be a hard-ass here either, just being a realist with some common sense. When someone is in charge of keeping care of something, one have to think about what they are supposed to be caring for from time to time during the course of the day.

~Doug
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"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

serpentinespecialties.webs.com

"some are just born to troll and roll"

If it was being heated, boy oh boy! lol I'm thinking it was not insulated and not tested. The guy could be young and just not know better. And the guy that gave him the snakes to Take care of, has to be held responsible too. Anything from a mini heat wave coming out of no where has to be accounted for.
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I agree,....definitely not insulated, or not insulated nearly well enough for it to get so lethal like that.

~Doug
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"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

serpentinespecialties.webs.com

"some are just born to troll and roll"

I think I got the story wrong. If it was the guys little building that left out of town, I'd say its more his fault. There I go blaming again.
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Yeah, if the guy that left was the owner of the building they were in, he should have at least looked at the 10 day weather forecast to keep close tabs on how things might be inside the building But the details are sparse here.

Sure is sad regardless...........

~Doug
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"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

serpentinespecialties.webs.com

"some are just born to troll and roll"

Yeah, if the guy that left was the owner of the building they were in, he should have at least looked at the 10 day weather forecast to keep close tabs on how things might be inside the building But the details are sparse here.
I don't know all the details of construction or heating/cooling of the building. I do know it was built by him and another friend who is a capable carpenter. But I had an ominous feeling when he had to have it built last year for his animals, as his wife needed the former reptile room in the main house for the new baby daughter. I felt the handwriting was on the wall for this young man's collection then, but didn't want to rain on his new parent parade. It just looked like the very beginning of a train wreck, what with the train just leaving the station...

This failure of outbuildings in animal collections is all to common. Years ago my friend who kept budgerigars and cockatiels lost them all when the automatic window vents didn't open due to sensor failure.
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Bob
Pyromaniac AKA Greatballzofire
Keeping cats allows man to cohabitate with tigers. Keeping reptiles allows man to cohabitate with dinosaurs.

Yeah, I definitely know what you mean, and fully understand how things can go horribly wrong if plenty of forethought to possible catastrophes isn't thought of and implemented before they happen. That usually has to do with mechanical, electrical, and/or appliance failure. Then there is what probably happened here, ..........complete thoughtlessness of the weather situation and how it might affect the animals inside compared to the extremely cold situation just prior to that. See, the weather temps obviously changed like night and day there as you mentioned, but the thought process obviously didn't change at all when the weather did, or even shortly after it did.

It still seems like an electrical, mechanical, or appliance failure never happened at all here,...just a horribly careless thought process failure.

~Doug
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"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

serpentinespecialties.webs.com

"some are just born to troll and roll"

Not trying to be a hard-ass here either, just being a realist with some common sense. When someone is in charge of keeping care of something, one have to think about what they are supposed to be caring for from time to time during the course of the day.
I agree. Although I feel bad for his friends who dropped the ball on this, they should have been paying attention.
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Bob
Pyromaniac AKA Greatballzofire
Keeping cats allows man to cohabitate with tigers. Keeping reptiles allows man to cohabitate with dinosaurs.

Yep, I fully agree Bob. Someone just wasn't paying any attention at all, and it had horrible consequences.

That's gotta be one of THE worst ways to go too.........

~Doug
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"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

serpentinespecialties.webs.com

"some are just born to troll and roll"

Its a pretty big mistake. Hadn't that room been tested before to see how hot it would get in the summer? I realize we are all human and make mistakes, but the temps in a room like that is something I know I would have worried about from the beginning. Especially when you have someone else's snakes, you have to be extra careful. And I think part of the blame has to be put on the owner. See John, I just like blaming people. hahahahaha But, I agree with you there too. I don't think we have enough to go by to draw any real conclusions here. It could have been a freak thing.
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I am guessing the heater was on and when the weather turned the friends failed to turn it off. I found out about this disaster when I called him to confirm a mouse delivery. I didn't want to press him for too much detail as he was obviously in shock and distraught.
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Bob
Pyromaniac AKA Greatballzofire
Keeping cats allows man to cohabitate with tigers. Keeping reptiles allows man to cohabitate with dinosaurs.

"I am guessing the heater was on and when the weather turned the friends failed to turn it off"

Yep,....I would bet money that's exactly what happened. Now if the building was VERY WELL insulated, it might not have happened (even though it would get warmer in time), or at least taken much longer to heat up to those lethal levels.

~Doug
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"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

serpentinespecialties.webs.com

"some are just born to troll and roll"

It reminds be of back when I was 18 and working in a pet store. A guy that used to come in to buy mice invited me over to see a bunch of baby kingsnake he had just bought. I got there about a half hour before he got home, so his girlfriend showed me the snakes. They were on the ground in little plastic cages with a light matres on top to hold the heat in from a portable heater that was pointing at them. We looked at the snakes and they were nice. I can't remember what king, but I do remember a gray banded and my overall feeling was he had spent about $500 on the snakes. After we looked at them she set the little mattress back on top and pointed the heater at It. When he got home he was all excited to see me and took my to the snakes to show me again. When he lifted that mattress nearly all of those cages had melted and only like one snake was ok, the rest were dead and I remember the alterna biting its self but it was dead. Damn, he started yelling and screaming at his girlfriend, then she tried to blame me, but he believed me over her. Then they started fist fighting and me and his brother had to break it up. hahahahaha I never went back there again. lol
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The snakes dying from the girls stupidity is just unbelievably sad, but the rest of your story describing swinging on each other is absolutely HILARIOUS!!!..HAHAHA!!...HAHAHAAAAA!!!

~Doug
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"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

serpentinespecialties.webs.com

"some are just born to troll and roll"

LOL I know. It was like Jerry Springer.
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"LOL I know. It was like Jerry Springer"

HAHAHA!!!!....I can just picture all of it unfolding!..:}

~Doug
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"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

serpentinespecialties.webs.com

"some are just born to troll and roll"

Apologies upon weak syntax. I meant ...oh, you must know what I meant...geez...
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Bob
Pyromaniac AKA Greatballzofire
Keeping cats allows man to cohabitate with tigers. Keeping reptiles allows man to cohabitate with dinosaurs.