Help!!

[Chu'Wuti]

Our local herp society does public education events for schools and libraries around the state. We have a policy of not exhibiting animals that are newly acquired/in quarantine. Our policy is that newly acquired animals are automatically considered to need quarantine, as we often simply can't know when we get them whether they carry disease or not. Quarantine should be a minimum of three months, and many people I know quarantine longer.

Here's our reasoning:

First, there's the obvious need to not spread disease from one animal to another when they're all near each other in a confined space and/or multiple people are handling them (e.g., 700 students in one day).

Second, and less obvious, is that such an event places the animals, even completely healthy ones, under a lot of stress. An animal that is "brand-new" to you is already under an unusual degree of stress, and so is an injured or ill animal. So an animal that is already in less-than-optimal condition due to being new to you or injured or, possibly, diseased when you don't know it yet, may be stressed beyond its capacity to recover, even though the impact of the stress wouldn't be visible to us humans.

Even though your recent loss likely wasn't caused by the exhibition, the Pueblan's inability to recover from whatever was wrong with him might have been exacerbated by the stress your snake experienced during the exhibition.

You and your organization might want to institute a policy similar to ours in order to help prevent any problems, whether similar or completely new, in the future.