Emergency! Please Read..

[akane]

Having had a lot of animals I can say you will deal with parasites. It will happen. Some are worse than others. Omg tropical rat mites=hell. The worst thing I have dealt with and someone said they considered them worse than bed bugs and just moved while trashing everything that couldn't be sterilized. 1 fed female falls in a tank/bin and the rodents in it are done. They will go from fine to dead in less than 24hrs as the 100s of mites hatch and feed off them stuck in the tank. While majority are stuck they will spread anyway. I went in to the doctor for rashes, scaly skin, and bite lines but he couldn't identify it and gave me steroid cream to see if it would help. The cat was on prednisone, the youngest dog was on antibiotics both for having red rashes and infected places on their bellies. We finally found this was all the tropical rat mites. The best thing ever was to make bio-active tanks. All that native soil I brought in from the wild was packed with mite species beyond what most usually see. Turns out that's because I had all sorts of predatory mites eating that mass of tropical rat mites and poultry mites from next door. A few of those escaping into the mite population of the house and no more tropical rat mites. No more going insane scratching, no more meds, no more dead rodents... The amount of advantage, revolution, and ivermectin I went through treating the guinea pigs, gerbils, mice, cats, dogs, birds.... I have never seen anything that bad before. I have a huge aversion to cold water especially when I'm tired and I was taking ice cold showers in desperation before bed to stop the biting.

Some do use the predatory mites with snake mites. It's a natural method in bio-active. My bullsnake was kept and treated with ivermectin an extra month because the person missed some snake mites and he was near the new ones. Like usual there are a range of approaches and I haven't had to look into the risks and benefits of each luckily. Hopefully with my natural population of predatory mites I never have to research mites again.