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Hurricane Preparedness: Animal Edition

Hey animal lovers, you’ve probably started seeing guides on how to keep your home and human family safe during a storm, but I haven’t seen much on how to keep your pets safe, and comfortable during a severe storm.

For Cats and Dogs:

Buy backup food, it might be a while until it’s safe to go back out and pick some up. If there is flooding, it could prevent stores from being restocked properly, and the last thing you want is to have to research what canned food is safe for dogs. 

Potty pads (no, trust me). During the storm, it may be unsafe to take your pet outside to go potty, or if your dog is anything like mine, he may refuse to tinkle in the rain. If that is the case, put down a potty pad so your dog doesn’t have to try to hold it until the storm passes. It may be a little smelly, but it’s better than directly on the carpet. 

For dogs with storm anxiety: consider asking your vet for a gentle sedative. A panicked animal poses a threat to itself and others, and trying to manually calm a dog for hours on end can be exhausting! If you cannot go to the vet, you can try baby benedryl (1mg/pound) to help calm your pet. If you do use benedryl, please be careful about dosing. DO NOT use benedryl to calm your pet if they have glaucoma, high blood pressure, or other cardiovascular diseases. 

For Reptiles:

Fast your reptiles. Reptiles need heat in order to digest their food, so please consider fasting your scaley friend before a power outage.

Provide backup heat sources. A good, inexpensive heat source I have seen used in the past are those hand warmers that are sold at CVS or sporting good stores. The hand warmers may run too hot for your pet, so put them under a towel or a pillow case to prevent your reptile from getting a burn. Be sure to check regularly that the hand warmers are still producing heat, and change them out for new ones as needed. 

For Horses and Other Livestock:

Provide identification for your animals. I have heard of horses and other large animals leaving their pastures for higher ground during a storm. This is one of their best options for staying safe. However, if your horse gets lost, it may be difficult to figure out what animals need to go where when it comes time to round them up and bring them home. To prevent confusion, use a small dog collar with an ID tag (with your address and phone number) on the ankle of your horses. Make sure it is very loose so it doesn’t impede blood flow or cause injury to your animal. Other ways to identify your livestock include Paint Sticks, a weather proof paint that you can write a phone number directly on your animal.

Be warned: Do not put proof of Coggins on your horse! While this may seem like a good additional measure, proof of Coggins allows your horse to be moved over state lines, and as people have learned the hard way, not everyone is honest. 

Emergency horse housing in Central Florida: Sumter Equestrian Center, Bushnell, FL - emergency stabling and camping - 352-303-4325 LEAVE A MESSAGE.

Marion County Animal Care and Control [phone]

Broward County Animal Care and Control [phone]

Palm Beach County Are and Control [phone]

The Sunshine State Horse Council has a searchable stable database as well if you need to evacuate your horses.

If anyone has anything to add about any other variety of animal that I have not included, please add to this post. I have no experience with birds, rodents, and other small animals when it comes to emergency weather protocols. Please signal boost this, you never know how many followers you have who live in range of the storm.

Stay safe, keep your pets safe.

#disaster preparedness #emergency

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Art Baby Girl Pins

#lizards #iguana #art

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ReptiCon June 26th, 2017 Pasadena, TX Pasadena Convention Center & Fairgrounds

Granite Burmese Python

#burmese python #snakes #so tiny omgggg!!!

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Why is feeding snakes frozen mice better for them opposed to live ones (aside from ethics)? Wouldn't the act of catching their prey be better for their bodies? I'm not trying to debate, I'm just curious why frozen would be better over not

This is a really great question and thank you for asking it!There are many reasons to choose frozen/thaw mice over live besides the ethics involved with watching an animal kill another animal and eat it when it’s really not necessary for the health or happiness of your predatory pet.1. It’s more convenient to buy 500 frozen mice in bulk than it is to buy 500 live mice and keep them alive for the span of 500 reptile meals. 

2. It is cheaper to buy 500 mice all at once for bulk pricing than it is to buy a single mouse 500 times and pay full price each time.

3. Live mice grow bigger, get older, change nutritionally over time as they age. Frozen mice stay the same size for as long as they are frozen and will, if properly stored, retain the same nutritional content as the day they were frozen.

4. Live mice may carry live internal parasites. Frozen mice only carry frozen and dead internal parasites, if any at all.

5. Live mice generally want to stay alive and will do anything within their small mousey power to not become dead. This can include attacking and injuring or even killing their predator. While in the wild we might consider a mouse who severely injured or killed a snake a bit of a badass, in the reptile keeping hobby a $3 mouse who kills a treasured and potentially very expensive pet snake is a nightmare.

6. Being grabbed by a mouth full of sharp teeth and then squeezed to death hurts a very lot. Proper CO2 euthanasia, while not without its own set of complicated ethics questions, is relatively less painful and considered generally quite humane. Cervical dislocation, when done properly, is almost completely painless and very humane (though less convenient and requiring more effort and skill than CO2). Everything deserves a humane death, regardless of why they’re dying.

7. Some people believe that feeding live prey promotes aggression in reptiles. I personally have not seen any evidence to support this but I think if I were given the conscious choice of teaching my snake that “wiggling and moving” = FOOD versus “lying relatively still” = FOOD and “wiggling/moving” = PROBABLY MAYBE NOT FOOD I’d prefer the latter for the sake of my wiggly hands.

8. Reptiles sometimes don’t eat their food right away. It’s not unusual for even very well cared for animals to refuse a food item for various reasons, especially if they’re conditioned to expect that food will appear again at the next regular interval. If you were to, say, drop a live mouse into your pet snake’s tank and the snake wasn’t hungry and decided not to eat, how long would you wait to take the mouse out? Like, a few hours? A day? What would you do with this live and now unwanted mouse? I may occasionally be in a rush and put a thawed mouse in my snake’s enclosure overnight and if it doesn’t get eaten by morning it’s no huge hassle to take a slightly smelly thawed mouse out of the enclosure and toss it to my carnivorous roach colony. I can’t say that I would feel as comfortable leaving a live animal with gnawing teeths and claws and will to survive in an enclosed space with my rather derpy reptile pet who lets me touch their eyeballs without seeming to notice, let alone care.9. Body condition-wise, having constant access to various forms of enrichment is going to be better for your snake’s health and well-being than maybe two minutes of “exercise” once every week or so before they eat. If they do already have constant enrichment opportunities, then that two minutes of “hunting” is really not necessary.10. I can’t actually think of any situation in which live feeding is easier, safer, cleaner, cheaper, or more convenient than frozen/thaw feeding. Sometimes a reptile will only eat live and refuse frozen/thaw, which I do understand, but that’s the animal’s preference and not the preference of the keeper. The only reason I’ve ever seen people genuinely prefer it as a means of feeding their reptile pets is for the gross spectacle of watching a living thing kill another living thing, which is honestly bad for all parties involved and bad for the image of the hobby in general. We need to be portraying reptile keepers as ethical, humane, caring and nurturing people who happen to care a lot about animals that don’t necessarily have fur or feathers.…And who also care about animals who do have fur and feathers, which is one of many very valid and carefully considered reasons why we feed frozen/thaw.

#a+++ answer #snakes #feeders #snake feeding

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A pet jeweled python

#art #snakes

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what snakes think, starring salsa

#snakes #corn snake #art #aww

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Murphy Photo Set 1

Purple Albino Reticulated Python

#snakes #reticulated python

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Comic: Cottonmouth Myth and Facts | Living Alongside Wildlife

#snakes #cottonmouth #water snake #psa

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#komodo dragon #lizards

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Noodle took advantage of the warm weather and decided to become grass

#gif #snakes #hognose

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#snakes #ball python

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This is Layla, sorry I forgot to show her off but she is my sweet little Spot nose banana ball python.

#awww #snakes #ball python

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the cast, revealed

twitter patreon

#art #lizards

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here’s a Shiny Boy

#art #gif #snakes

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A Pet Portrait commission featuring Otis the Crested Gecko! 

#how cute!!!!!! #crested gecko #art #lizards

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Hi 😸 So about six months ago one of our snakes escaped its enclosure and despite constant searching and worrying we couldn't find him. Until this morning that is when our 5 year old came in telling us he was in the lounge room💕. He is in good health and didn't even snap when my partner caught him and he is so much bigger now. I'm super glad he's is back in his enclosure and safe but I still feel like a bad snake parent so does anybody else have any escaped snake stories?

I am so glad you found him omg! I had Thresh escape once (when I was a very new keeper and kept him in a glass tank) when I forgot to latch one side. Luckily he had found his old hide in the storage under his cage and was just sitting under it :P

#i've had three escapes #two of them i found behind/on top of my refrigerator a few days later #the other i discovered right away because he slithered out into the middle of the living room #while we were watching tv #and scared the hell out of us #snakes

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fat

#omg #snakes #art