How to Prevent Illness in Pueblan Milk Snakes

"One of the most common illnesses with milk snakes is the ingestion of foreign substances, ie. Their substrate. If they digest too much of their substrate when their eating a mouse, it can lead to impactions internally which can result in death of the snake, or if it's caught in time an expensive surgery. To prevent this, you can take your snake out of the enclosure when you feed it, put it in a Rubber Maid container where there is no substrate to ingest or you can use a grate or something on top of the substrate when the snake is feeding so that it's not right in the shavings when it's eating. The other thing that sometimes snakes get, are parasites such as mites. Again, if it's a captive bred snake it most likely isn't going to have mites but if it's in an area where there could be a wild snake that was brought into captivity, is wild snakes transfer the mites to the captive bred snake. Now, mites are kind of like fleas on a dog. Their tiny and look like little black pieces of pepper walking on your snake and they go underneath the scales of the snake and actually just feed on the snake's blood. They're very, very tough to get rid of. But there are some easy methods that are available. There is a stuff called iVomectin which is available in injection form. You have to go to a vet; they'll measure out the correct dosage for the weight of your snake, and inject it. Usually it takes a couple sessions, two or three visits to the vet, two or three doses of the iVomectin to completely get rid of the mites. There's also an iVomectin spray. Now there is some stuff they sell on the market as well to get rid of mites. Sometimes it's successful, sometimes it's not. I mostly recommend, if your snake has mites, go to your nearest vet that specializes in reptiles and amphibians. That's your best bet of getting rid of those tiny little mites."