- So I've taken in a lot of different reptiles,
especially snakes, which are probably one
of the most common that are kept,
and they've come in in tons of different conditions,
and being honest, a ton of them have died.
Definitely not a large percentage of them,
but still, death is pretty inevitable and pretty common
when you offer taking any snake of any condition,
and because of that, we eventually had to start saying
we can only take snakes of certain conditions,
'cause I just couldn't keep up
with that much rehabilitation, and vet bills,
and stuff like that.
But I thought that I would do a video
on old age and snakes, because I think that one
of my personals is actually getting close to that point,
and that's a weird thing to talk about,
'cause I'm basically doing a video anticipating the death
of an animal, but maybe you'll find it interesting.
So Rosie, my boa constrictor, she's still alive right now,
and I got her when she was 21.
I should actually check that.
Yeah, I got her June 4th, 2018, when she was 21 years old,
which makes her over 23 years old,
and snakes live pretty short most of the time,
because a lot of people don't know how to care for them.
And then those are in the wild,
just naturally, they get sick,
they get killed, they get eaten, all sorts of stuff,
different mites, ticks, parasites, stuff like that.
Naturally animals in the wild
are gonna have shorter lifespans, and then in captivity,
snakes don't have great standards of care from people,
and so they do often die prematurely
from incorrect husbandry
and people not noticing the signs of illness,
and then there are just many flukes that happen,
where reptiles can simply drop dead
for reasons that you can't actually tell,
until maybe after the fact, or maybe you're never sure,
because they're very good at covering up illnesses,
and there's just so many different species,
and so many different types of animals that are kept.
And we don't know a ton about all of them,
because they haven't been kept for as long
as some domesticated animals, for example.
So Rosie, she was originally purchased
by somebody from a local pet store, I think.
They eventually just got bored
of the animal about a year in,
and so it kind of got dumped
on a family member, who happened to work at my old school.
That family member then kind of just dumped her
in an enclosure, but kept her in the classroom.
So she started as this juvenile and grew up in the school.
It sounds pretty cool.
It sounds like kind
of an interesting class pet or something,
but unfortunately, she was not given any proper care.
She did have a really large enclosure,
but this inclusion was caked in poop and urine,
and old rat fur, and snake shed,
and she clearly never had a good shed.
She didn't have any humidity.
The classroom was like 60-something degrees,
and she probably couldn't even comfortably digest food,
but she was hardy enough to actually survive
in this room for about an additional two decades.
So I went through the school system,
and I didn't even know that the snake lived there,
because nobody really talked about it.
It was shoved in the back of the room,
and everyone was scared of it anyway,
because the snake was big, and mean, and scary,
but it was actually just really nervous and shy,
and didn't know anything about people,
because she was simply fed
by eating a frozen thawed rat thrown
in the enclosure once a week,
and she got pretty chubby from that as well.
So I eventually dropped out of that high school.
It sucked.
I don't recommend that school.
So basically they were tearing down one
of the school buildings,
but the inclusion was actually built inside the building,
meaning that they couldn't fit it out of the building,
and the only way of getting this enclosure out was
through the windows, and they didn't feel like doing this.
So instead they were gonna call the vet in,
and euthanize her inside the enclosure,
so she basically would have been raised for 20 years,
never touched, never messed with, in the same enclosure,
never moved, and then euthanized in that same enclosure,
'cause they didn't feel like dealing with her.
So I, at the time, I was still living at my parents' house,
had no space, almost no budget, and all of a sudden,
oh, of course, that's my responsibility.
"Do you want the snake or do you want it to die?"
So the same day I went and picked her up,
and from the very start, she was very angry,
very upset, and seemed very mean,
but she was obviously just terrified,
because she was living longer than me
without any human contact for the most part,
and then all of a sudden, she's thrown into a tub,
thrown into a car.
Not thrown in.
I carefully sat her in the car,
and then driven like 30 minutes to my house at the time,
and she then lived in this tiny tub for a few weeks,
'cause I needed to just get the money to build an enclosure,
then build that enclosure, and that's where she lived
for the next two years up until now.
So I am moving again, and so she is tubbed again,
but she does have a slightly larger tub,
but starting maybe six months ago or so,
I started noticing differences with Rosie.
This was before I moved,
so it was the same husbandry, same temperatures, same diet,
same feeding schedule and everything,
but she just started to act a little different.
She was acting a little slower,
and she even seemed to not be as interested in food.
So thankfully they did not feed her live.
They fed her frozen thawed at the school,
and I also feed frozen thawed to all my animals,
unless it's one that comes in that's only eating live,
and we have to transition it,
but I also tong feed all of my animals,
meaning that I basically feed them by hand
instead of just leaving it in the enclosure,
and it took maybe a few weeks, maybe.
I think it was like a month or so
to get Rosie to eat from tongs,
and eventually she did start doing so,
and she did that for a few months,
but a couple of months, or a few years, I mean,
but a few months ago, she actually stopped tong feeding,
and she completely refused food,
which I thought was bizarre,
so I just left it in her enclosure overnight,
and it was gone the next day.
So she actually reverted
to eating when I only leave the mouse in her enclosure,
or the rat, 'cause she gets large, basically jumbo rats,
and most recently, I did feed her recently,
so I'm not handling her in this video.
So I did actually get to see her eat because I came in right
as she was starting to swallow the food,
and she just had a bit of trouble.
She did it very slowly, she has very low energy,
and it took her a very long time to just even figure it out.
In addition to this,
I could tell she did start to not really lose weight,
but instead lose muscle mass, and she became weaker,
so that was scary.
I don't know what I titled this video,
but it's probably something related
to old age and snakes, but I am just pretty sure
that Rosie is simply reaching the end of her lifespan.
So red tail boas, or technically she's a BCI,
or a boa constrictor imperator,
which isn't actually a red tail, but people call them that.
So this type of boa, they can usually live
for pretty long, way longer than 23 years.
For the most part,
the average life span is probably much shorter,
since so many people have trouble with them as babies,
'cause they don't know what they're doing,
and so all those dead baby snakes
probably lowered the average a lot,
but there's basically a big range of how long they live,
and for the most part, it's just all over the place.
And so Rosie, if she was raised properly from a baby,
I'm sure she would live way longer than to her mid-20s,
but honestly, I'm impressed
that she's lived this long at all.
When I got her, I had no idea how much time would be left,
and yeah, I mean, just like how everyone was very impressed
that she even survived
in the first place in that previous enclosure,
which shows just how ridiculously hardy of animals they are,
which is kind of unfortunate, in a way,
'cause maybe she would have been better off
just dying early, and not dealing with the next few decades,
but at least she's gotten the last few years to hang out,
and maybe be a little less upset.
So regardless of that, like I said,
she's just been in the, what I would consider proper care
for two years, but it might just be simply
to the point where she is slowly shutting down,
because it's hard to find information on old age in snakes,
so basically the only info I can find online
is just random forums of what people are saying,
and it sounds like it's pretty similar
to humans and other animals,
and that's lower energy, less interested in food,
losing muscle mass, and overall just being more lethargic.
It would be different if I was noticing other symptoms,
like maybe she has a respiratory infection,
like bubbling in her nose or something.
You can see if she has an external parasite
like mites or ticks, and just things like that.
You can pick all those up,
but there's nothing that I've ever seen
on any other snake that she has
that I can relate to her health slowly deteriorating,
and that's why I'm very confident
that it is simply her getting old,
and it's really weird to think about,
'cause I never did think about snakes getting old.
Obviously they all die eventually, but in my case,
I always just end up with the sick ones
that are likely going to die anyway, or I re-home them
before I even see them grow up all the way,
because I don't keep most of them permanently,
'cause I had taken and then re-homed them and stuff,
so Rosie might actually be the first one
that I see die from old age,
and seeing this happen in person is kind of interesting,
so that's why I'm sharing it.
So yeah, if you've had an experience with that,
I'm definitely interested to hear it,
and in a way, this is kind of a Rosie update,
and I'll continue to try and improve her quality of life,
and just kind of keep an eye on it.
So it's been a few months.
She's had lower energy.
She moves a lot more slowly, but she does still move,
and she can still get to her hotspot,
and away to her cool area, and she can still eat.
She just has a lot more trouble,
and it takes her a lot longer.
She doesn't seem to be in pain or anything.
She just simply seems to be slower
and weaker and more difficult to hold,
which is also another reason I'm not holding her as much.
I'm just kind of letting her hang out, do her thing, relax.
She also sleeps a lot more,
'cause she used to kind of casually explore her enclosure,
but she does tend to just kind of sleep,
and when she is sleeping,
I have thought that she was dead a few times,
because she kind of just lets her body sag more,
and her head is just more limp,
compared to kind of keeping it
in a steady place when sleeping and sitting down,
so it's just kind of interesting.
When it comes to bowel movements and stuff,
she has been passing everything normally.
Everything looks normal there,
and like I said, if something suspicious comes up,
I could always take her to the vet,
but I'm definitely curious what her lifespan would have been
if she was cared for differently from the start,
and if she was cared the same as when she was at the school,
I wonder if she'd still be alive now,
or if she would have died sooner,
like how different the timeline would be
with these different variables.
So it's hard to say, can't really say anything for certain,
can only guess on that.
And then the next question is when a snake actually dies,
what do you do with them?
Well, in my case, if, say,
somebody gives us a very sick animal
who clearly has a lot of issues,
and normally we just refuse this kind of animal,
but sometimes they slip through the cracks,
and somehow convince us to take it anyway,
and say, it just dies immediately the moment it gets here.
There are a handful of options.
One, you can just dispose of it as a biohazard item,
which obviously, that's not very respectful
to the body of the animal,
and the amount of respect you care about giving
to that can obviously vary
on what you'd actually do to them.
So in my case, when I know an animal died
from something that was not anything internal
or disease-based, oftentimes I just find a legal,
safe area outside to place them,
'cause it's almost just a way for them to decompose,
which might sound unfortunate, but it does end up going
to feeding and helping out another part of the ecosystem,
but the thing is, I definitely do not
want to introduce anything
that could potentially harm a local or natural ecosystem,
so, say, and I think if a certain animal has parasites
that came from somewhere else,
I would definitely not do this,
and I don't think that you should feel guilty
for simply disposing of an animal just
because it was an animal,
because if you ask me, it's just a body.
It doesn't actually mean anything once it's dead.
However, there are definitely other options,
and places that cremate animals
like other pet cremations, like dog cremation and stuff,
they can do snakes and other stuff,
so you can always do this as well.
It's gonna be a very small amount of ashes,
because it's just a skeleton,
and a very small reptile skeleton,
but that is also an option for you.
I don't think you can really embalm a reptile.
I'm guessing that's not really an option,
but other than that, yeah, you can get it cremated.
You can dispose of it.
You can put it outside, or you can bury it,
if you feel comfortable with that,
you have the place to do it comfortably and legally,
and if it doesn't have anything that can be contracted
to other animals, but if you bury it,
obviously it'll only be eaten
by earthworms and maybe some maggots,
or whatever you can get to it under the ground,
but, of course, that could still spread things as well.
So it's just kind of a planning ahead sort of thing
that you can think about there.
So with Rosie,
I don't actually specifically have a plan yet,
and I do think that she could have
any indeterminate amount of time.
Maybe she'll completely recover,
and she's actually just in a slump.
Maybe she is actually sick,
and I'll need to get her checked out,
and do something from there,
or maybe she is really just getting old,
and who knows if she'll die in a couple of weeks,
a couple of months, or a couple years.
It's just a matter of watching her quality of life,
and see where she goes from here.
So I have a ton of 10 generally unpopular opinions
on veterinarians, but I definitely think
that they have and can be a useful resource,
so if you are concerned
about your animal being close to death,
and you don't know much about the signs
or symptoms or anything, it definitely wouldn't hurt to go,
other than it may hurt your wallet depending
on what they get you to do, and just be very careful
with when it comes to the types of medications they give,
'cause oftentimes, reptiles are very overmedicated,
and are given the incorrect antibiotics, in my opinion.
So with Rosie,
I don't think she needs to be
on any antibiotics for anything.
I don't have too much else to say in this video,
just wanted to talk about the topic,
kind of bring it up, open a little discussion as people say,
and you can feel free to comment about it below,
your experiences with old age and animals,
dead animals, death in general, whatever you want.
Interesting topic to me,
and it may be my first time experiencing it with a reptile.
So yeah, that'll be it for this video.
I'm Alex, and thanks for watching.
(slow hip-hop music)