It’s kind of silly to ask, and I know it’ll be really hard to answer, but I’m hoping that maybe someone could offer any help at all, trying to figure out why my garter is sick?
The problem is that I don’t know how to explain ‘sick’, she seems okay, to any casual observer, but she isn’t acting like herself. I have a number of garters (Hebi is an eastern, but I also have a Florida blue, and a ribbon snake), and I’ve found that each has a very unique personality, and I’m used to handling and caring for each as individuals rather than just ‘a garter snake’. The best way that I can explain knowing that Hebi is sick is to say that she just isn’t acting like herself.
Nothing I know of has changed in her environment: same substrate, same temperatures, same routine, same diet, etc. Her cage is always clean, she always has fresh water, and she’s fed every third day (with very occasional exceptions when I’ve been hit with a particularly nasty amount of homework).
I feed her worms and guppies (I’ve offered her pinky mice in the past, but these really aren’t her thing, and she refuses them) regularly supplemented with calcium. I’ll admit that other vitamin supplements are rare, because she doesn’t like the taste, so wont eat whatever food they’re on/in.
I find it particularly disturbing that she’s begun to act unusual, because she’s relatively young. She’ll be only three years old this August, and she was born in my dining room, since then I’ve been able to interact with her on a regular basis. She, along with another female from that litter that I kept, is my ‘baby’. Likewise because of this, I doubt that she’s got any kind of parasites or viruses.
As for ‘sick’... well, I’m not sure how to describe it, but I’ll do as best I can: she is, of course, Hebi, but she simply isn’t acting like ‘Hebi’. She doesn’t have very much energy, and doesn’t move around much. She’s very weak when I pick her up (seems to be getting worse as time passes, I’d been hoping at first that she’d just been having ‘a bad day’ or something) but doesn’t seem to have too much trouble moving around. Just kind of like she doesn’t have any power while she’s moving, even though she’s moving just fine. She isn’t eating nearly as much as usual. Now, for example, she ate on the last feeding day, and had two worms, and three days before that ate just one, but for the two feeding days before that, she’d eaten nothing, and today, when I tried to feed her, she just sat in the feeding tank looking at me like I was stupid for over an hour (actually, I leave them alone to eat, so I don’t disturb them. She only really stared at me like I was stupid for about five minutes). She’s pooping regularly, but the volume of the otherwise normal-consistency ‘steaming piles’ is significantly less, which I think is because she’s not eating?
Again, it’s hard to describe, and probably more impossible to interpret, but please, if anyone here has any idea at all of what I could do to help her?
Is there something else that I could look for in her environment that’s changed?
Does anyone have any ideas at all of what might be wrong, or questions about information that I might have left out?
Thanks in advance, even for taking a look at the post. I’m really starting to worry about her. I know it seems like too little information to figure out what’s wrong – but I’m at a loss for explanation myself right now. Any input at all will be greatly appreciated.
--- Whitney the assortment of garter snakes
PS: the picture of her is a couple of months old. The area looks grubby because I was in the process of cleaning out her cage and she was so cute when she came out to see what I was doing that I had to take her picture.
