Found a garter in need of help?

[The Snake Whisperer]

This summer I've been dealing with 70 plus rescued garters of various ages and there are two foods that they have been willing to eat well. Earthworms is the #1 food they as well as my own pet garters, eat eagerly But recently, extremely dry weather conditions has made it tough to find areas in the woods that are damp enough for a productive earthworm dig so I turned to experimenting with a variety of other foods. The one food next to earthworms that the majority of the garters willingly eat, either 9 Lives meaty bites beef slices cat food or Friskies beef slices in gravy cat food-the two brands of this food are similar enough the snakes will eat either brand (one snake really astounded me with its show of intelligence, by reaching up when I was dropping a spoonful of the beef slices into a big paper plate for the snakes, and neatly taking a slice from the spoon. I offered a few more slices, one at a time, and this snake each time rose up and neatly took the slice from the spoon and repeated the behavior until it was satisfied. I tried to take a photo with the other hand, don't know if I managed to get a good pic or not coz I haven't had time to check the pics. If I didn't get a good pic, I'm sure going to try again because I doubt anyone, including myself until the day before yesterday, has ever seen a garter snake who taught itself to eat from a spoon!)
In addition five of these rescue garters decided I didn't have enough snakes to take care of and added over 150 little shoestrings to the population. A number of the baby garters willingly ate the beef cat food too although it has to be crumbled into really tiny pieces because a baby garter is easily intimidated by anything much wider than its own head.
I did have to cut the slices to make them thinner in width for the smaller snakes (yearlings and a few of the 2 year olds) to get them to eat and not be intimidated by the width of the food. Its strange that a garter will eagerly swallow a toad wider than itself but they are afraid to even try eating an earthworm that appears to be too large for them to swallow & from what I've seen so far, this seems to be true of everything I've seen a garter eat except for toads.
One note, try to wash the gravy off of the pieces of the food because the snakes eat the food more eagerly when they don't have to deal with the mess the gravy makes. This issue of gravy mess is even more important for babies, when there's more than just a tiny bit of gravy with the meat, they get sticky and have trouble moving around and have to be washed off. If they weren't washed off, they probably could become stuck to something because that gravy tends to have a gluelike effect when it dries.

Not only do most of the garters like it, but it was the one food that my handfed orphan baby robin was willing to accept in lieu of earthworms too, after the bird finally decided to eat on its own
Another food that I had some success with last year with a litter of baby garters was 9 Lives super supper bits rolled into shapes similar to earthworm shapes and once the babies figured out it was soft, they would willingly take bites out of larger chunks of it.

There WAS one other food the rescue garters liked when I tried it but after trying it, I decided it wasn't good for their health and that was canned smoked herring and because it was smoked and also quite salty, I discontinued it.

Foods I tried that the snakes rejected included canned tuna, tiny live fish in their swimming pool (I never have gotten a garter of mine to eat any kind of live fish, they will ignore the fish and let it live out its lifespan swimming among the snakes!), pinky parts, and chicken. Regarding canned fish, perhaps strong scent was why the garters would eat the herring.

I will post a separate thread detailing other things I discovered while working with these garters.
But you might try that beef slices cat food.

[guidofatherof5]

Great job rescueing the garter snakes.

Garter snakes will eat many thing that aren't good for them. They don't know when something is dangerous they just want a full belly.
Processed foods are not recommended (cat food, canned fish for people) They are not developed for reptiles. There is even controversy whether it's good for pets and humans. Things like sodium and preservatives are a major concern.
With the availability of other safe foods(frozen or fresh salmon/tilapia/trout) I think it would be much better to convert these snakes over.
I by know means am telling you how to take care or your snakes but the issue of cat food and canned foods in general have been discussed on this forum before and most members are in agreement that these food items can do more harm than good in the long run.
If I may use an analogy.
Most of us know someone who has smoked all their lives and lived a long life. Smoking doesn't seem to have had too big an impact on them.
That is a very small percentage of smokers. Most of us also know someone who has suffered the debilitating effects of smoking. I myself have lost my father and mother(secondhand Smoke) to smoking, along with a number of dear friends.
Converting these snakes over to a more safe food source is in their best interests.

[ConcinusMan]

Canned fish almost always contains a significant amount of salt. It might as well be poison. Garter snake's bodies do not need salt at all and they do not have a way to expel excess salt like mammals do. Marine iguanas are about the only reptile that can handle salt. Other than the salt or other additives, there's nothing wrong with canned fish even though it's cooked but cat food is a horrible thing to give your snakes.

It may seem expensive when you see the price per pound for safe fish fillets(trout, salmon) at the supermarket but I can feed 6 huge adult concinnus and about 50 babies for around $7 a month so it's not that bad.

[Mommy2many]

I don't think fresh fish is all that costly compared to pinkies. If you alternate between worms, fish, and pinkies, I think it is most cost effective. I certainly don't feed mine as many pinkies as they would like, I suppose

[Mommy2many]

Most of us also know someone who has suffered the debilitating effects of smoking. I myself have lost my father and mother(secondhand Smoke) to smoking, along with a number of dear friends.

I as well. I lost my mother, she was 45, just after I turned 14 to smoking. I lost my dad at age 67, just after I turned 30. Back then, they did not realize the danger they put themselves in as well as those around them. My Mom was alive for 2 months after she was diagnosed with cancer. One of the first things she made my sisters and I promise is that we would never start smoking. That is a promise I have always kept.

[ConcinusMan]

This summer I've been dealing with 70 plus rescued garters of various ages

Wow. That's a lot of garter snakes. Makes me very curious though. How is it that so many snakes needed rescuing?

What I mean is, rescued from what?

I believe that many people with good intentions try to "rescue" animals that don't need rescued and are better off left where they were found.

svon89 started this thread about a snake possibly in need of rescue. There's no obvious signs of injury and it's apparent that the area where it was found has everything needed to support garter snakes so I don't believe there is anything to rescue it from. Just my opinion.

I've seen more snakes that needed rescuing from the people who were keeping them than one's found outside in need of immediate medical attention or relocation.

[guidofatherof5]

I as well. I lost my mother, she was 45, just after I turned 14 to smoking. I lost my dad at age 67, just after I turned 30. Back then, they did not realize the danger they put themselves in as well as those around them. My Mom was alive for 2 months after she was diagnosed with cancer. One of the first things she made my sisters and I promise is that we would never start smoking. That is a promise I have always kept.

Good for you and your family, Le Ann.

[The Snake Whisperer]

The attached photos will clearly explain why I ended up with so many rescued garter snakes this summer.

One day late last spring, the neighborhood kids came to me carrying a bucket containing 5 injured garter snakes, because I'm the person in the neighborhood known for being able to identify tracks, plants, gut piles, etc and for being the one person in the neighborhood who is likely to know what to do for an orphaned or injured creature somebody finds. So naturally, the kids brought these five snakes to me. Of course I asked them where they found the snakes. They led me to an area of the field behind my house where two years earlier, someone had dumped huge piles of carpeting and carpet padding. Over time the carpet remained intact but the padding was rotting and had become separated from its backing of mesh woven into tiny squares-this mesh may be nylon, it reminds me of fishing line although it's rougher in texture and a bit thicker. The squares that the mesh forms are just about the right size for a 2 year old garter snake to squeeze through-or at least get part of the way through it. There I found many trapped snakes, some alive, some dead.

The carpet padding has an insulating quality about it that makes it warm during the night and cool during the day. It also is full of folds, nooks, and crannies. Thus it attracts garter snakes by the dozens.
Inevitably the snakes try to go through one or more of the mesh squares and get trapped. When they struggle to try to free themselves, the mesh of the square acts like a sharp knife, slicing into their necks and bodies as they struggle to free themselves from it. Some of them hang themselves and strangle to death. Some of them get so entangled in the mesh that they are woven through several squares, each square's threads slicing into them like knives as they try to get free, until they die from their multiple injuries. Others become trapped where they are subjected to the full effect of direct summer sun all day and that kills them.

The day the kids first alerted me to the problem of the snakes in the padding, I came home and got an old pillowcase and a pair of good scissors, went back, and carefully cut the padding in big circles around trapped snakes so I could just put the trapped snakes, still trapped, into the pillowcase. I took them home where I could then use hemostats and a surgical scissors to carefully pull the embedded threads of the mesh away from their bodies enough to cut the pieces of mesh and free the snakes. Every single snake lay still during the process which amazed me, wild snakes never before having been handled by a human, laying still and cooperating while their first experience with being handled was to have a hemostat prodding in their wounds and a scissors cutting right next to their skin!

After cutting the snakes free, I would wash them in lukewarm water and then apply Panalog ointment to their wounds and put them in a plastic holding container so the Panalog could soak into their wounds a few minutes. Then I put them into a big plastic tub that I'd set up for them. Almost every single snake as soon as I put it in the big tub, ran to the container of water I'd set up in the tub for them to drink and swim in, and drank and drank. Some of them soaked themselves for hours in their swimming pool after being put into the big tub.

After this first episode, I started as much as I possibly could, to make regular daily checks of the padding for trapped snakes and rescuing whatever snakes I found in it that were still alive.

Had the padding been a reasonable amount, I could have put it in a big trashbag and hauled it out of the field, but there were no fewer than four huge piles of it. The photo of my German Shepherd dog near one of the piles will give you an idea of the size of these piles. There were also smaller pieces and piles scattered here and there. Since I couldn't remove the padding from the area, I put as much of it as high up on top of tall weeds or across the low branches of the few young trees growing in that area, to try to make the padding less attractive to the snakes. This helped although I suspect that what really made the numbers of trapped snakes dwindle until near summer's end it's become rare for me to find any at all dead or alive, is that most of the snakes in that area either had been trapped and died or else were in tubs at my house recovering.

Five of the trapped snakes that lived were gravid females and altogether they presented me with 150 babies. I fed the babies for a few weeks and then released all but a few of them either near the stream in the woods behind the field they were trapped in, hoping that the location is far enough from the padding in the field that they won't return to it (the last half of the summer has been extremely dry and the stream itself is the lowest I ever saw it, but it's also the only water source for the wildlife in the area so I'm hoping that fact will also encourage the snakes to stay in the woods near the stream) or on a nearby friend's farm where they could be as safe as a garter snake can be in the wild. I also released adults that were totally healed, eating good, and in good overall physical condition and behaving normally.

The rest of the adults (and yearlings and 2-year olds) that I couldn't release in time for them to be able to put on weight and condition for brumation, I'll have to keep through the winter and release them in the spring. There are a couple that can't ever be released because they probably couldn't survive at all in the wild, due to the effects of their injuries. The worst injured snake to survive has the rear 2/3 of her body scarred up, twisted, paralyzed, so damaged it's even permanently a duller color than the front third. However, she manages to compensate for it well enough to get around in her cage and swim and eat, etc although she does strike some very strange poses that no normal uninjured garter would ever get its body into!

[The Snake Whisperer]

Here are three closeup photos of the body of the girl whose body is so badly scarred and deformed. She does have feeling in her tail but she sort of drags everything of her body from the first deformed scarred spot on back and kind of throws that whole part of her body around in her process of navigating her cage, getting in and out of her pool, etc.
The photo where she is being held up was taken to show her paralysis more clearly. When a normal snake is lifted this way, it will either automatically bring the back part of its body up and wrap around your hand or lift the back part of the body with the front in an attempt to wriggle free from your grasp. As you can see, her back section just hangs. The section of her body that is discolored and twisted and scarred is apparently permanently discolored and scarred since it hasn't changed appearance when she sheds. It always remains much duller in color, resembling the way a normal snake's skin looks when its getting close to shedding. The front part of her body however, is totally normal.

[guidofatherof5]

How long have you had the snake?
I have one with a displaced spine that is doing well.
As long as it still has some control of its bowels and can shed(maybe with some help) it could live a long time.
Best of luck, keep us posted.