Overview

In this section i will go over my techniques to quarentining new and sick animals. This will cover the steps needed to make sure your new animal or collection of animals is safe from parasites and diesease.

My Current steps to quarentining new animals

When i recieve a new animal, i always make sure i do a visual inspection of it when i get home from where i have collected it from, i personally dont do it when colelcting because i like to trust that the seller has good ethics. However when i do inspect he animal it is purly for welfare reasons rather than trust. Once the animal has been inspected depending on what it is i will measure its weight or just visually confirm its healthy to make sure its within normal bounds, again this depends on the species.

Depending on the species and my assesment i will then put the animal in the enclosure it is going to live in and if i assesed it as being at risk from deieses or parasites i will then make a judgement whether its fit to be put with normal substrate medium or a towel/tissue purely to check its reactions, faeces and parastitic load, genrally for a lot of lizards i will be checking for mites and if i suspect the animal has parasites i will take it to an exotic vet at the first chance i get.

Once the animal is deemed fit i will then start treating it like it should be in its natural enviroment, using the correct substrates and moving away from observation based care techniques.

An experience of my own quarentine

I would always recomend making your own plan for quarentining an animal, you never know what will happen i have had situations where i have though my BTS had mites and went into full quarentine mode to make sure my animal was fit and healthy.

 I first removed all substrates from the enclosure when i noticed what i though where mites (They where not the bad type of mite but i was unaware at the time) Once all the substrates where removed i put it all into black plastic bags and binned the lot, i was less knowedgable at the time so i researched what temprature the mites could survive at and found that under 10c they begin to perish in a few days so i removed all the decor and put it outside it was mid feburary and was between -2 and 10c in them two weeks. i left the edcor outside for weeks to make sur the mites where destroyed and then thorughly washed the decor.

On the same day as removing everything out i clean the enclosure fully and used the oppertunity to reseal some of the silicone paste, i used antibac across the full enclosure and oyther cleaning products, the BTS is in a plastic rub for a few hours with a heat mat and once compleate the clean i line it with paper towels and monitor the BTS for a month until i start to put normal substrate in, i have not seen these mites in the enclosure since.