Wild caught snake with wounds

[jules]

sorry leann i skipped a page when reading posts. you have done the right thing.

[Spiritwolf]

I would have probably kept the snake, but the reason I am posting is to say that the wound in the photo looked like it was healing very well without infection. In the photo there was no swelling around the wound and no sign of oozing. The color of the wound didn't show any presence of pus. An infected wound will usually have swelling around the wound, ooze with pus (especially if gentle pressure is applied around the outside edges of the wound, an abscess with a lot of pressure in it can squirt pus out for several feet when pressure is applied!) or will show the typical greenish to yellowish color of pus in the scab.

I lived on a farm when I found wounded snakes, or more often when the cats found and brought a wounded snake to me, there was no vet in the area that would deal with snakes. So I treated them as I would treat mammals with abscessed puncture wounds, cleaniing the wound, applying antibiotic, and providing the snake a place to recover and rest (which was a 10 gallon tank with a good lid). At the time I had no pet snakes so I used a folded soft towel for substrate, gave the snake a water dish, a cardboard den, and covered half the cage with a towel so the den side was in the dark.

I've treated a number of snakes with abscessed puncture wounds by first gently softening the scab if it had scabbed over, then flushing the wound with peroxide. The foaming action of peroxide helps flush the wound and an infected wound will usually bubble up with reddish yellow pus colored foam when cleaned with peroxide. After cleaning the wound, common triple antibiotic ointment can be squirted into the wound. After doing this every day for several days with the snakes with abscessed puncture wounds that I treated, the infection was gone and the wounds were healed cleanly or almost totally healed and clean (meaning free of infection, wound closed completely, with some scab still present.) Before using triple antibiotic ointment, I used Panalog ointment (an ointment used to treat many external problems in animals, it's used for everything from wounds to ear infections!) and it worked very well too.

All the snakes I treated were found and treated in the summertime when it was hot enough that there was no need to supply extra heat. In cool weather or in air conditioned coolness, a heating pad set on low, placed under one end of the snake's enclosure, works to provide supplementary heat. If the snake is nervous, covering half of the cage so the snake has a dark place to rest, will help calm the snake down.

Incidentally, snakes must like me or something since I still have never yet been musked by a snake and still don't even know what snake musk smells like, except for reading about it (sounds like it compares to the stench when a frightened mammal expresses anal glands).

I've never been bitten by a snake except for little Feisty, whose story I will tell one of these days, and whose biting was due to her being about the size of a short shoestring and newly arrived here in her new home! Even she didn't musk me!

However, now that I've mentioned the subject, Murphy's Law probably will see to it that I eventually get the dubious honor of being musked someday!

[infernalis]

There are some soul stirring choices here.

Good luck with whatever road you chose

[adamanteus]

This is an old thread guys! She let the snake go ages ago!

[infernalis]

This is an old thread guys! She let the snake go ages ago!

I just noticed now that you pointed that out.

James, that was a "dead thread" I have found many like that.

If someones snake is dying, once they make the final post, and everyone says condolences, is there some way to archive it, yet lock out any additional posting?

Or "squeaky got loose" then 4 house later, "I found squeaky!" the thread just sits till someday someone says "I hope you find it" 6 months after the fact.

any way to fix that??

[Spiritwolf]

Perhaps then, there should be a way to make a separate "Old Threads Archive" folder for the old threads to go into for each topic.

Now, if only Google would learn to separate old stuff from recent stuff when I do searches. I hate it when I search for something such as a freeware, and get links from 2001, 2002, etc, badly outdated, coming up on the first page!