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Incident that occurred last night


[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] [ The Rat Snake Forum ]

Posted by gretzkyrh4 on March 14, 2003 at 12:19:54:

Hi all,
I am writing this on behalf of a roommate as a warning to other inexperienced rat snake owners. He picked up his first yellow rat snake back in the fall and it has proved worthy of escaping from most any cage it has been placed in. Anyway, he recently switched the snake to a new cage made from a clear plastic sterilite container with a wire mesh sunlight in the top to allow for good airflow. To ensure that the snake would not rub its nose on any possible rough edge in the wire mesh, he lined the edges of it, after it had already been attached to the plastic, with duct tape. For a few weeks now it has worked fine with the snake not trying to escape. Yesterday, however, when I returned from a class I found the snake writhing in the duct tape. It had attempted to escape from the cage and in doing so, it had peeled up the edge of the duct tape and become stuck to it. We immediately cut the section of duct tape free from the rest of the tape lining the screen and began soaking it in water hoping it would slowly come free. After a few hours of this with no visible loosening of the tape, we attempted to apply baby oil with a que tip to where the snake was adherred to the tape. Slowly, this began to work and after about half an hour the snake was free. He was a little stressed, but appears to be fine now.
I just thought that I would post this as a warning to others who may like to build there own enclosures for there snakes. And I figured just in case it does ever happen to anyone else I would mention that the baby oil was effective. It does take a little time, but it got the tape off without the loss of any additional scales.

Hope no one else ever has to deal with anything like that,
Chris


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