Reptile & Amphibian Forums

My favorite year-old silverback struck at the glass last week of her neodesha cage when I fed her...

I've had other boas do that over and over and they seemed unaffected, but she did it just once and now has what appears to be a minor infection on one side of her lip.

Is there anything I can do to speed her healing time?
(besides using neosporin)...

She is a delicate beauty, she regurged a few times when she was a neonate. She's nice and plump now...

It is hard to offer advice without pictures. However, I have an interesting experience that may lend some help.

A couple of weeks ago one of my males struck the front of his cage when I was feeding another boa, he managed to hook his front bottom teeth through his "lip". This ended up resulting in me carefully unhooking it. I used a cotton swap to hold his mouth open, and used another to help unhook his lip, I then used tweezers to fix the rest. I made sure he had fresh water and he was fine.

This past week my male Bolivian did the exact same thing, and the boa that did it before managed to get both the fron teeth on the bottom AND top hooked through. Result was the same procedure and both were fine. It has to be done VERY carefully though, to not hurt their jaws or scales.

Check you boa to see exactly what is wrong. Remember to provide clean fresh water to help prevent infection.

She had a piece of aspen stuck in there, I thought it was all
dried up puss.

She ate and looks good. I change their water every 2-3 days.

I had a much worse case where my big female hog got her mouth
caught up in a twisted up coat hanger once. I was using the
coar hanger to prod a dead rat so she would eat it, and she bit
the coat hanger. Scared the crap out of me, I was terrified for
my poor snake, but she got it out on her own in about ten minutes...