Hygiene in housing and grooming reptiles
Most important:
- Use specific instruments for the care of animals
- Never use family bathroom or kitchen to clean the insruments or the terraria or aquaria
- Wear gloves to manipulate soiled substrates or water
- Always clean your hands after touching the reptiles or their environment.
Hygiene in housing
- Daily:
- water basin: clean and disinfect (Never exceed 3 days), change water
- ground: remove remains of food, droppings, soiled substrate, and skin of moulting snakes
- Weekly:
- Quarterly (at least)
- deep cleaning of the entire vivarium and its accessories: clean, disinfect, rinse, dry
Keep in mind:
- The interval of deep cleaning can accept variations (every one month to every three months) depending on the species of the reptiles
- It must be remembered that bacterial proliferation is dependent on two main factors: the droppings and moisture.
- The protocol therefore must make sure to remove the droppings as soon as possible and maintain all dry and clean
Products to use:
- cleansing: dishwashing liquid and warm water
- disinfection:
- white vinegar 50% in water: for current use
- or bleach 10% in cold water
- Attention: do not use in the presence of the snakes due to a respiratory toxicity
- corrosive for metal cages
- must be applied during a time of 15 minutes to be effective
- chlorhexidine: be careful, it has a narrow spectrum
- quaternary ammonium compounds
- or various kinds of trade disinfectants.
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Some are both cleaners and disinfectants: apply a first time as a cleanser, and a second as a disinfectant
- respect the time of effective contact
Grooming
- The most important is to maintain ideal conditions of temperature and hygrometry for the considered species
- Bath: snakes and some lizards like Pogona vitticeps, need a water container big enough to have a bath.
- water spraying: twice a day
Particular case of the aquatic turtles:
Water
- the volume of water must be of 40 litres to 2 cm length of turtle, plus about 15% more space
- To keep low nitrate levels in the aquarium, change 10% of the water every week or 20% of the water every two weeks.
- If you don't have a filtration system water, you need to change an aquarium of 40 litres two to three times per week and an aquarium of 200 litres once a week. It is advisable to buy a water filtration system.
The other points are the same