Truthfully, I don't really “quarantine” at all. I definitely see the point of it but here is the kicker for me;
I have a collection of around 80 animals right now and I make purchases fairly often. All my snakes are kept in one fair-sized "L" shaped room in my basement. Let's say I get a new snake tomorrow and I keep it in a room upstairs, away from my collection for 3 months but after 2 months I get 3 more new snakes. Where do I put those? In that same room? In another room? And what if I get a couple more snakes later that month? See where I'm going with this?
I’m not crazy about what I am doing (more so NOT doing) currently but unless I have 5 or 6 rooms to quarantine animals in, I don’t see the point. Animals get checked over thoroughly and treated for mites regardless of the source; I learned THAT lesson the hard way. I try to keep them away from my new animals but the more I think about it, the more I am of the thought that if I can’t quarantine 100% properly, there isn’t much point. I worked in a Bio-Pharmaceutical plant for a while and there I learned what quarantine REALLY is. It’s not just housing them in the next room for a few weeks. It’s not adding new animals to animals already in quarantine. It is a very stringent routine that must be followed to the extreme or else it’s all kind of pointless.
This problem also applies to shows. If I go tot a show and bring 30 animals to sell and I sell 25 and purchase 6 new ones, do the 5 left from my stock now go into quarantine? They should. What do you guys do in this case as well?
What I would like to do is have a few rooms (3+) designated for quarantine that each have a different "levels". What I mean by this is each animal that comes in to my house goes in room 1 for one month (Level 1). In that room, animals are kept in very clean conditions and monitored closely for external and internal parasites. They would also get a blanket treatment for some of the more common “ailments”. Then, after one month, they would graduate to “Level 2” for a month which would be somewhat less strict and then to “level 3” until they would be introduced into the “general population”. But this method, while being as close to “right” as I can think of is a good one, it still has some errors.
So, that’s kind of where I stand. What are your opinions and methods?
Talk About... Quarantine Practices!
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