by Boadicea » Fri Aug 15, 2008 3:13 pm
I have had baby snakes get stuck on the underside of those foil heat pads that are supposed to be able to be stuck down and stay down. Mostly I have found them and managed to get them off the sticky part before anything serious happened. However I always check the ones in my baby snakes' cages a number of times even after I have set them up since I lost a baby dumeril that got caught on the heat pad and burned to death. This was despite the fact that I had glued the damn thing to the backwall of the tank rather than the floor hoping to prevent just this from happening. The baby tried to climb up the edge of the heatpad for some reason and managed to lift up a small edge just enough to kill himself. I was besides myself.
I had a plastic heatpad (one of those black jobs) set alight in the baby iguanas' tank. Fortunately the newspaper did not set alight. It just burned a hole in the newspaper. The heat pad itself melted.I do not know why. It had been fine for months and just one day decided enough was enough. Now I view all heatpads as a necessary evil. Fortunately my two little girls survived. I have heard similar stories about these heat pads from other people.
Heat lamps dont work too well either. The bulb was secured to the mesh on the top of the tank with two long screws and those plastic plugs you use to put screws into walls but somehow it came down anyway and dropped onto the moss at the bottom of my water dragon's tank. It dried the moss out and the moss then proceeded to smoulder in that spot. It also melted the nearby false rock foam backing that these cages come with. I came home to find my child ill from smoke inhalation and plastics poisoning. He died about a week later despite all my efforts to save him. I felt so terrible.
It is just so difficult to anticipate everything that can go wrong when keeping reptiles. I sometimes feel like I need six brains just to anticipate all the problems that could occur.
"You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life, for eternal us, is now; and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything, catastrophic included"- e e cummings