In the early summer, late spring of 2013, I started fighting a problem with Athena. Just before I moved to Matt’s house for a month before moving to my current residence, Athena developed a pushing problem against her cage. This behavior is perceived as a form of extreme stress, where the animal is stressing so much in its environment that it tries to escape its enclosure to seek out homeostasis. We see this behavior across many snake species. Originally, I thought she was going through a growth spurt and desired more food, and so I first upped her intake, and she responded well to it. When I finally moved to Matt’s for my temporary 1 month stay, she eventually broke out of her enclosure, by finding a weakness in its design and using it to her advantage. I thought it was the temperature because the room I moved into was the smallest room, so it was sometimes the hottest and the coldest room in that house. I worked around this problem as much as I could at the time and it became more of a problem. I moved into my new residence the next month, on the second story, and the problem continued. Over the first month of living there, she effectively broke her cage completely. She shattered the plexiglas and got out. She was very stressed out. She temporarily went to Jeff’s house to stay while new cage arrangements were made. She was built both a smaller cage and a larger cage. In her new cages I tried new humidity and temperature levels, forms of heating elements (both radiant and under cage), substrate composition, mixtures of substrate composition, water bowl sizes, feeder species, feeding intervals and intake, more handling time, less handling time, hides, no hides, covered cages, uncovered cages, placing a male with her to see if she wanted to breed, placing males around her in separate cages to see if that’s all she wanted, placing females with her in the cage so that she had a companion, and just about anything else you could possibly think of. Nothing worked. As she continued pushing, she created a horribly raw area on the front of her face. And it never healed. As she went into shed, it would heal, until she came out of shed and the process would start all over. This area became infected, and I did my best to manage it as I could. I would remain on top of it all, but it was recurrent because she’d never allow it to heal. Eventually, she took a turn for the worse. I submitted blood and culture samples to veterinary pathology. The results came back as Pseudomonas, and a very resistant one at that. There were no identified susceptibilities, even across the aminoglycosides. Pretty much, that means she wasn’t going to get better, and that she was going to die from the infection. Also, upon receiving the results, she began to show signs of intermediate sepsis. She was dying and there was nothing I could do. I put Athena down to spare her pain. In my head, I know what I did was the right call. I know she had no way out and that this was the best way to end her suffering. But in my heart it still hurts a whole lot and Im conflicted. I appreciate all the support everyone has given me in this trying time. Thank you.
Posted on: Thu, 17 Jul 2014 11:37:46 +0000
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