Fuck Yeah, Animal Welfare!

reptilefacts:

What substrate should you use? This is often very confusing for a new reptile owner, as there are many different types and brands out there and people will recommend different stuff depending on their own experiences. This is just a brief list of the most common and popular substrate with their pros and cons.

Aspen: made of finely shredded aspen. Pros: easy to spot clean, good for reptiles to burrow into, reasonably cheap. Cons: doesn’t look very natural, goes mouldy in humidity, can stick to food and be ingested.

Orchid bark: it’s used as a material in plant nurseries. Pros: looks very natural, holds some humidity, is good for use in a naturalistic vivarium. Cons: doesn’t hold heat very well, sticks to food and can cause impaction, can go mouldy in high humidity.

Sand: there are several different types of sand but I will cover the general pros and cons as all sands are essentially the same. Pros: looks naturalistic, allows for burrowing behaviour in desert species. Cons: difficult to clean, escapes everywhere, easily ingested, expensive, suitable only for desert species that live on sand in the wild.

Newspaper: a good way to reuse old newspapers. Pros: cheap, little chance of it being ingested with food, don’t need much to cover a large area. Cons: is difficult to clean when wet, doesn’t look very realistic, ink can stain (particularly white reptiles), doesn’t allow for burrowing behaviour.

Reptile Carpet or Lino: both have the same pros and cons - easy to clean, easy to cover a large area but doesn’t look very realistic, doesn’t allow for burrowing behaviour. Reptile carpet is expensive, whilst lino is realitvely cheap.

Cedar, Redwood and Pine shavings should not be used as substrate, (or as building materials in a vivarium unless it is sealed with varnish afterwards) as these types of wood are toxic to reptiles.

As a rule of thumb - any loose substrate (such as aspen, orchid bark, coco husk, beech chips etc) has a chance of being ingested. The risk of impaction (from ingested substrate blocking the digestive tract) can be lessend/avoided by placing food bowls on a piece of slate (to stop substrate from getting into the food bowl) or by feeing outside of the viv altogether (as there is no chance of any substrate being ingested).

reptilefacts:

Above all things, you should research your reptile as much as possible before you get it, so you know what conditions it needs to be kept in so it can live a long and happy life. But here are just some general tips about keeping reptiles :) I’ll be spreading them out though as otherwise it’d be a very long post!

Part 1 ~ Heat Sources

When deciding how to heat your reptile (if it should need it, a few species can do without), avoid heat rocks. Heat rocks are not a suitable heat source for any species - as they get so hot that snakes in particular will end up curled around the rock for too long trying to warm up and will end up severely burning their belly.

Instead, use a heat lamp or bulb, or a heat mat. When using any of these, they must be regulated by thermostats - by themselves they get very hot and can burn your reptile, and in the case of heat mats under vivs, cause damage to the viv and whatever the viv is standing on. Even small, low wattage mats can burn through the bottom of a viv when they get hot enough (as the heat just continues to build up from the moment you plug it into the mains).

Note : Heat mats NEVER come with a built in regulator, so if the guy in the petshop tells you that you don’t need a thermostat because the heatmat will regulate itself, he is mistaken. Also, try not to buy the cheapest one there as you’ll get what you pay for. And check that the thermostat you have bought can handle a high enough wattage that it can control your heat mat or bulb.

There are also different types of thermostats - on/off or non-proportional thermostats and pulse or proportional thermostats. If you have a mat, you need a non-proportional thermostat, which will turn off the mat when it reaches the programmed temperature. If you have a bulb (including ceramic bulbs, which creates infra-red heat but no light) you need a proportional thermostats, as it adjusts the amount of electricity that the bulb gets.

When setting up your heat source you need to make sure that by providing heat you don’t provide your reptile with an escape route! You can put heat mats inside a vivarium, or underneath (though the probe of the thermostat must always be inside the vivarium or close to the heat mat in order to get an accurate reading of how hot it gets). When setting up bulbs (or ceramics), use a bulb guard (to prevent your reptile from coming into direct contact with the bulb), and make sure it is secure and your pet can’t get into it.

Note : accidents do happen, and sometimes thermostats malfunction - this is life and can’t be avoided. But you can check the hot spot often (with a infra-red heat gun, or a reptile thermometer with a probe - not with a stick on dial or heat scale sticker as they only give you the ambient temperature) for peace of mind.
Heat mats will malfunction or become heat-blocked if they have a lot of weight pressed on top of them (from a large vivarium on top of the heat mat, or a large and heavy snake lying directly on the heat mat). They will also stop working/malfunction if bent, or the copper conducts in the heat mat break.
Bulbs will malfunction if turned on and off frequently and if the wrong wattage is used for the fittings and the thermostat.

My computer decided to kick it today. It won’t even start up.

reptilefacts:

Before you rush out and buy a pet reptile, consider how long that reptile will live. Leopard Geckos can live for 15+ years. Bosc Monitors can live for 20+ years. Cornsnakes can live for 20 to 25+ years. Royal Pythons and Boa Constrictors can even live from 20 to 30+ years - a long term commitment in any pet.

But the sad fact is, a lot of reptiles - particularly Leopard Geckos and Bosc Monitors - barely live to be 2 years old. Why is this? Because of bad husbandry, incorrect housing and heating, coupled with poor or incorrect diets. So make sure you research your potential reptilian pet, and make sure you’ve got the husbandry spot on!

sundrythings:

    Please, do not come into the vet with a (insert animal of your choice) and say something like “I’m not really sure what they eat”. Before purchasing an animal you should know exactly what kind of husbandry to provide for it. I see too many iguanas whose owners had no clue they needed UV lights, sugar gliders who eat nothing but sugar water, leopard geckos kept in a rainforest terrarium, and arboreal snakes kept in tiny tanks tanks with nothing to climb on.

    Before bringing an animal home you should have a habitat set up with the proper temperature gradients, water bowls, and landscaping already done. Get a few books and read up on the animal so that you are prepared with what it will need from you. This doesn’t just apply to things that live in tanks; I see people that come in with dogs they just got from the Walmart parking lot down the street and they have no food bowl, no leash, no dog food, etc. If you really want a pet go home and think about it for awhile and do your research and then after a few days if you still want it go out and get everything together and then select an animal.

    Also, when I know that people know what they are doing and truly take excellent care of their pet but it got sick anyway, I am more willing to “overlook” some charges and maybe do a few minor tests for free.

(via reptilefacts)

reptilefacts:

Feeding live is only really recommended, when an animal that will otherwise starve as it refuses to eat defrosted or fresh killed and when all other avenues have been tried.

The advantages to feeding defrosted are numerous. It’s easier to store frozen food, it’s easier to feed, any parasites on the food are killed off in the freezer, and there is no chance of the food fighting back. Defrosted food can be left for the snake to eat at its leisure and the owner needn’t worry about returning to find that the snake has been injured (or in some cases, killed) by the rodent.

Fresh killed has the advantages of an animal that until the moment of feeding as alive. Fresh killed food is a good way of converting a stubborn livefeeding snake to frozen, and again has the advantage of the snake has no chance of being injured by it’s food item.

In the UK it is illegal to feed live food items (or any vertebrate), though it is not illegal in the US. The only time at which live feeding is allowed in the UK is if the snake would otherwise die and all other options have been exhausted eg: scenting (with fish, toads, rodent bedding), different food items offered (such as multimammate mice, syrian hamsters, chicks, gerbils, etc), warming food, part boiling food, braining (exposing the brain matter), leaving food items in overnight, trying different coloured food items (some snakes won’t take black or certain coloured rodents).

These are all good reasons to feed defrosted and fresh killed over life food. I’ve not listed the disadvantages to feeding live as there are plenty of stories of snakes having been injured or killed by their live food.

stalkofwheat:

fuckyeahanimalwelfare:

 

consumemylovedevourmyhate reblogged your photoset: myasphyxiatedmind: ruineshumaines: by Carli…

This is why I say breeding is a selfish act.

Except that responsible breeding is done to better the health, longevity, and temperament of a breed and a reputable breeder is lucky to break even let alone make money off of breeding.

Many of my *responsibly bred* rats have been freely given to me by their breeders also. Not because there’s anything wrong with the rats [well, one of them I took on as a special case, but she’s irrelevant to this] or the breeders can’t find someone else to home them or anything like that. But despite the cost it takes to care for and breed rats responsibly, some don’t like charging money for people [non-human people, yes] who’re essentially family. I tend to donate to a charity [usually the NERS Rescue Fund] instead.

Even responsible rat breeders who do charge for kittens, they’re nowhere near going to cover the cost of the decision to breed. That is the care of the litter in question, let alone the costs involved with caring for the numbers required to breed in an ethically responsible manner. A couple of years ago, a good friend of mine who breeds rats told me that the money she makes from selling babies very rarely even covers the costs of feeding the mum and babies for 7 weeks. Tangent: I know in the US it’s normal to home rats out younger, but in the UK the NFRS states 6 weeks minimum, with breeders who have slower-maturing lines using 7 weeks as minimum.

The only way to breed rats and make any money at all from it involves breeding malnourished unstimulated babies (and probably kill-culling too) from malnourished unstimulated overcrowded adults who aren’t given more than basic medical attention. Extra money for you if you’re being dickish and charging more for some varieties than others. If you want to breed rats responsibly, you need to be prepared to lose a lot of your own money. And that’s while noting that rats don’t even have the available health tests that larger species have access to.

It’s incorrect, wrong and downright unfair to lump all breeders together. Anyone who sticks a boy and a girl together and gets babies is technically a breeder; that doesn’t mean every breeder should be supported just as much as it doesn’t mean every breeder should be unsupported. You need people ‘clearing up’ the problems caused by irresponsible breeding and farms, but you also need people working from the other side to promote longterm benefits and change.