Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I have just experienced my Burmese being bitten by a rat for the first time and I am a bit of a nervous wreck right now (Please bear with me), so I wanted to seek the advice of some of you more experienced Burm owners.

I have fed her live rats/mice for over a year without incident until now. One of the rats that I fed her today didn't seem to want to go very easily. She struck it and wrapped it up immediately as usual, nothing out of the ordinary, but as I turned back around (I always make sure she has killed her food before I leave her unattended in her feeding box), I noticed that it was in the process of biting her. I quickly pulled its jaws off of her (it clamped down on my thumb as well!) and held its mouth closed until she finally killed it.

The couple of bites were on her neck, about five to six inches behind the head (She is a year old and approx. 5 1/2 feet long). The bites aren't terrible or gaping wounds or anything like that, and it really didn't bleed. However, they are noticeable and did break the skin in a couple of places (don't appear to be deep, just superficial.)

I immediately put Neosporin/Antibacterial Ointment (Painkiller Free kind) on the bites. My question is, is this the correct way to treat something like this on a Burm? Her tank is very clean and I use newspaper, so hygiene shouldn't be an issue as far as infection. Will Neosporin heal these wounds? Should I not take her out of her tank for a couple of days until these have a chance to heal up?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
(BTW, I'm definately going to pre-kill the little buggers next time.)

Thanks

switch to f/t or at least p/k. There is no reason o feed it live. If you do it correctly you can almost always switch a snake to them. We have a little discussion a few posts down about this so I'm not going to waste my breath. As for the bite wound if it did not go deep or anything I would not worry on putting anything on it. They are very tough animals. (with healing) I am having a bit of a problem switching mine to f/t simply because it is little over 7'. the older they get it is usualy harder to switch and i have been working with this one and what I do now is let him have one rat alive but stunned a little bit by a hard blow to the head and then I feed him anotherone completely dead. I am not realy trying to hard as to switch to f/t because he will be going on 1-2 pound rabbits as soona s I get some. and I don't want to put so much work into the f/t rats because I will have to switch it to f/t rabbits then. lol. I tried feeding him a 5 pounder but he gave up on it. He tried eating it neck and back first. He has the worst problem finding the head thta it is sometimes a little frustrating but as long as he eats I am happy. Woops I have rambled on again. I have a talkign disorder I think becasue I go on and on. lol. Just try to switch to f/t asap before it get to big.
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Justin

Thanks for the info. She has eaten pre-killed before, but only on a couple of occasions when the rat/mouse just happened to die before I could get it home. So fortunately she won't be too hard to switch over. Once again, thanks for the advice.

Something else I heard to help them heal was to keep them dry. So if you keep a bowl big enough to soak in, you may remove it, and opt for a smaller drinkin dish for a week or so until it starts to heal.
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1.0 Albino Green Burm
0.2 Normal Burm
1.1 Java Retic