Started the day off with a panic attack at around 3 AM. What a great start, huh? Finally went back to sleep around 5 or 6 and slept until 2 or 3 PM ish, but by then I was feeling a lot better. Ate breakfast which tasted awful because I was missing the key ingredient and then ate onion rings instead >.>. So healthy! From then on everything seemed fine, until my sister noticed that the right side of my lizard's head was bleeding. NOw I first thought this was because both yesterday and today she was restless and actually quite violently throwing herself about the cage, which I just dimissed as her normal pre-shedding behavior, but I noticed as I examined her that there were little red specks along various parts of her body. The spots rubbed raw on her head were because of how hard she was scratching. She's pulled a few scales off along her body. There's really only one explanation for that with lizards: mites. How wonderful! I took her out and bathed her, took some pictures of the wounds, and then googled things for a little while which is when I learned about the mites. I proceeded to freak out again. Why? I realized I noticed the same markings on the shoulders of one of my rats a day or so prior. Just great! My animals are infested. Oh wait! My dog was itching like crazy a few days before as well. A spray of some flea killer made him stop, thank goodness... but with exotic pets it's super important to be careful what products you use around them.
I realize now how hard it is to see, but these are the spots that are just on her head...
Unfortunately, the rats don't sit still long enough for me to get a good picture of them ): .
My sister then took the girls (the rats) and bathed them, leaving me to freak out over my lizard once again. I took everything out of her cage and began scrubbing it all down, which probably took about an hour because of how anal you need to be with getting rid of the little buggers. If you want to know what products to use or how to disinfect a cage, let me know! I'd be happy to tell you guys how, but otherwise I'll get on with the story.
Once Kris' (my lizard) cage was clean, I rubbed oil all over her then set her in a bath. After a few minutes of letting her soak, I took a toothbrush and began scrubbing her--gently because you don't want to pick off scales--clean. Once finished, I put her back into an abnormally empty terrarium, then moved back to the girls'. Now that they were washed and dried, I took the last step in the cleaning process and removed everything from their cage, then scrubbed all of that clean. And since I was on a roll, I cleaned out my Chinchillas' cages. The boys weren't showing any signs of itching and from what I could see they had no bite marks, which I found odd. All three of the critters' cages are in the same area so why wouldn't they have mites too? I realized that there could only be two reasons for this: 1) the new bedding shared between the lizard and the rats 2) the worms shared between the lizard and the rats. Unfortunately, there's no way for me to be sure just what caused all this. Mites are incredibly small and impossible to see without a microscope, so I can't fish through the bedding and the worms to figure out just where the little guys came from, so I had to throw both out. Now what I found (bitterly) hilarious about this situation, is that both products are Petco buys.
Let me start by saying that I hate Petco. I bought my lizard from them and she was practically dead and was too young to be sold legally. Kris would've died if I didn't beg my parents to take us to the vet. It took several weeks of non-stop hand-feeding, medicating, and warming her to bring her to a normal-ish weight, and even then it took months for her to get back to a normal growing speed. Then after that, her right arm breaks. She's so fragile because of the ill treatment as a baby, and also because of poor breeding. But the treatment of pets isn't the only thing I hate... they mistreat the feeder animals as well. Worms are kept in containers without food so they starve and rot, crickets are kept in plastic tubes in vast numbers, mice are kept in entirely too small containers with far too many roommates, the list goes on. And as for the instructions they give when you adopt a pet, they're generally wrong. Most of their pamphlets instruct you to place lizards on substrates, which is a huge no-no, especially as infants. But enough about that... I could go on for hours on why Petco is such a horrible place.
My advice to you is to make sure you're buying whatever product from a clean environment, make sure you know when the product was made and when it is supposed to expire, and make sure you read the ingredients before purchasing. If you're buying wood shavings, keep in mind their might be wood mites. If you're buying live worms, keep in mind there may be intestinal parasites somewhere in the mix, etc. You might not ever fully be aware of what you're buying which is incredibly frightening, but unfortunately that's how our industry works. All I can say is to try your hardest to be educated!
The only good things that happened today are: my sewing machine arriving, me finishing Markiplier's livestream. Finally I can finish that glove tutorial I was working on as well as get to doing some other tutorials I've had on my list for a million years! And as for the livestream, finishing it up was just amazing. I cried quite a bit at the end there and aaaagh. I rambled a lot on the video itself so I'll save you all the trouble here but I'm really so proud to call myself a fan of Mark's, Wade's, and Bob's. They're amazing people and the amount they raised was phenomenal. I could only dream of doing something like that!
Oh, and before I forget, I'm going to be joining in on a challenge--actually, I already have--and if you guys are interested join me too! Here's the official page for it although I use the hashtag #100daysofhappiness instead of #100happydays (which was an accident but too lazy to change it haha). Lemme know if you join in!
