If dogs go to kennels and cats go to catteries .....

Post date: Aug 26, 2016 2:10:15 PM

For many people, going away on holiday means they have to find a kennel or cattery, pet sitter or neighbour to look after their pets for a fortnight – but when you have a large number of snakes and lizards, what do you do?

In fact, it’s quite straightforward, although a fair amount of preparation goes into it. A healthy snake can easily go without food for some time (ours are, in the main, fed every two weeks), so we try to feed them all between two and five days before we go. This gives them time to digest before we go – a snake can regurgitate two or three days after it’s been fed, and the last thing we want is to come home to a two-week-old, half-digested, rotten mouse! Spacing feeding over a few days makes it more manageable, and also means that if a snake refuses to eat on the first night we can try again the next night.

Feeding aside, we have to make sure that everyone has fresh water (multiple sources if possible, just in case the snake decides to sleep in its water bowl - or worse, pee in it!), and that each thermostat is working and correctly set. Special attention is given to any animal that has health issues, or has had a cold in the last few months.

Lizards aren’t quite so easy, but we don’t have so many. Heat and light has to be checked, of course, well in advance so that we can order and replace anything that looks as though it might fail. We have one “tropical” tank which has a humidity-controlled self-watering system so we make sure that the tank is full, and both Sam (the bearded dragon) and Cobalt (the blue tongued skink) have a large water bowl. Fresh greens and special high-nutrition insects are bought in and put into the vivariums as late as we can leave it – mainly because, once the insects are in we have to close the vivarium doors as quickly as possible and then cannot re-open them, or the food would fly out! Some of the insets are fly larvae which can still be eaten if they hatch out into flies, so they are basically a “slow-release” food. Sam seems to take this as an “all-you-can-eat” buffet, and charges around his vivarium trying to eat as much as possible.

Saphira the leopard gecko needs to be fed every couple of days, so she is the one animal who has to be found a home for the holiday, usually with one of our volunteers. Generally this goes very well, but one year she had an encounter with a cat (the cat came off worse).

I’m happy to say that all of this worked well this year, despite the heat, and came home to a house full of happy, healthy animals, and no bad smells!

It’s always a little stressful getting everything ready before we go, and worrying when we come home. It was so much easier when we just had two cats; they both had passports, and came with us!