How to Prevent Illness in Hognose Snakes

"Keeping your snake healthy is very easy if you provide it with the proper enclosure, the proper substrate, and the correct temperatures. Something you want to watch for is ingestion of foreign objects. When the snake is eating its food, you want to make sure it's not ingesting any substrate, any shavings, any Aspen shavings. If that gets in the snakes mouth in can create problems. If it gets in the snake's digestive track it can create problems as well. What you can do is remove the snake from the enclosure to feed it. You can just feed it in a Rubber Maid container or another container that has no substrate on the bottom so you don't have to worry the snake ingesting anything. Another common problem we have, especially of wild caught snakes, is parasites. That's why I recommend captive bread snakes. Captive bred Hognose Snakes make better pets than wild Hognose Snakes. But every now and then, even your captive bread snakes will get mites, most likely introduced from a wile caught snake that's in the same store or in the same room. If your snake does get mites, the easiest way to get rid of them is take your snake to a vet. There, they can give them injections of Ivomectin which will get rid of the mites. It usually takes about two of three treatments every two weeks. To fully get rid of the mites there's also Ivomectin that's available in a spray where you can spray your snake as well. Usually those two treatments combined will get rid of the mite problem."