![]() ![]() During this time period, it is vital to your animal’s survival that it experience only the very most necessary stressors – after the initial sale and shipment to you, it’s best to leave that animal alone and give it time to settle in and relax. This can be very stressful and the animal may take weeks or sometimes even months to fully settle in and begin to thrive again. It’s acclimating and getting used to its new home after being brought into the country, held in temporary import / quarantine cages, and eventually sold to a keeper who will then get that animal fully established in its final full time cage / tank / what have you. Think about this – we just imported an animal from halfway around the world, intending to establish that animal in captivity now. And for some species, it’s best not to do it at all in many cases. Now what? I should take my snake to the vet and get medicine to kill off the internal parasites, right? Well, this is a topic of some debate but I have found over the years that it’s best not to do this right away. So the immediately contagious threat – external parasites – has been taken care of. Nix will kill ticks as well, but their nasty little tick corpses will need to be manually removed afterwards. I like to treat again after 7 days to interrupt the life cycle of any stalwart mites that may have somehow survived the initial treatment. Sometimes a second treatment may be necessary so be sure to quarantine your new pickup from other animals, even after treatment. I like to tell everyone to ALWAYS treat every incoming snake for mites, whether you see them or not, just to be safe. ![]() This is very important – a mite or tick infested animal, left untreated, can cause an entire collection to become infested within days, or even hours depending on the extent. We treat all incoming animals with Nix to kill any mites or ticks that they may be harboring, first thing, before there is any chance that they could spread and infest other animals. Nix is very safe and very effective and we have used it for over 20 years. I will be writing a future article on how to use Nix to treat for mites – keep an eye out for it. Treating for external parasites is quick and easy – we use and recommend a diluted Nix solution ( Click here to buy, amazon affiliate link) for treating mites and ticks. (In fact, we treat ALL incoming animals for external parasites – whether captive bred or wild caught, as, I am sure you are aware, mites are unfortunately quite common in poorly quarantined captive collections). Since external parasites are highly transferrable between animals, they are the very first thing we worry about when we open up a box or a crate of wild caught animals. Whereas snakes and lizards from West Africa are devoid of mites, but they do occasionally come in with reptile-specific ticks. For example, mites are a common tagalong external parasite when dealing with snakes (and some lizards) from southeast Asia / Indonesia, as well as South America. Which parasite you will have to deal with depends on the species of animal and which part of the world that animal comes from. This is pretty much unavoidable and true in almost every case, unless an animal was recently hatched/born and somehow collected before it had a chance to contract the usual bugs that exist in their natural habitat. ![]() So first off, what does “treat for parasites” even mean? When animals come in from the wild, they will pretty much all have either an external parasite of some sort (such as ticks or snake mites) and/or internal parasites (such as worms that live in the digestive tract). Your mileage may vary and your opinion may vary based on different experiences, but this is what I have found to be the most effective way to approach this issue. I am not a veterinarian and this is simply my opinion on the best way to do things, based on many years of dealing with wild caught critters. These are fairly simple questions, but the answer is complex and may or may not be the same depending on the individual circumstances – so here I’ll try to explain my reasoning on why we do things a certain way. Or, how should that customer go about treating the animal themselves. As we do sell imported and wild caught animals here, one question I get very frequently is whether the animal in question has been treated for parasites. ![]()
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