Lucy: A successful rescue story!
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Hi everyone! This is Lucy and we rescued her 3 months ago. I just wanted to share her story here cause it’s a really happy one 🙂
My partner and I found Lucy on Craigslist in early April and I was immediately heartbroken. I’ll attach here *before* pictures in replies below. Essentially, a couple bought Lucy for their 9 year old two years ago. Now 11, he had completely lost interest and OF COURSE, her care was left entirely up to him as the parents were actually too scared of snakes to have anything to do with her. When we found her, she was half the weight of our 8 month old male BP though she was a little more than 2 years old. At the time, she was living in a 20 gallon tank with one hide, aspen bedding, months worth of feces, layers of stuck shed, no clutter, and hadn’t been fed anything larger than a hopper. They couldn’t even bother to fill her water bowl even just for the picture. Her sad tank was on their son’s carpeted bedroom floor so her UNREGULATED heat pad was literally scorching the carpet. No thermostat, no hygrometer, and one stick-on thermometer. Her tank was drrryyyyy dry dry.
We didn’t have the extra money at the time as they were asking $150 for her. I emailed them and asked if they’d be willing to take $100 since we’d have to purchase all new EVERYTHING for her. No response. But I couldn’t stop thinking about her! I posted her to multiple groups on FB to try and get someone to go save her. Sickly, I was met with some keepers telling me that, besides her enclosure, she seemed to be in great shape!! I couldn’t believe it! A couple of days later, a VERY generous donor reached out to me and offered to pay the $150 so that we could go get her. I literally cried. I emailed the people back and told them that we could pay them the full price and they finally responded. “We paid $100 for her 2 years ago, plus you get the tank and everything in it, so I feel its a fair price.” Hahaha no. But I didn’t want to argue, I just wanted to save her.
When we arrived, they explained to us that she was incredibly docile, so much so that their 2-year-old child often handled her so she was “used to being handled by kids.” I was floored. She was in the most pathetic shape. She was nearly completely limp. My partner booped her snoot to test her attitude and she didn’t react at all. A lot of her stuck shed had actually managed to come off before we arrived as they had finally put water in her bowl… which was now full of flakes of her skin from her trying to desperately soak herself. But she had a tight cap at the end of her tail and we were sure she was going to lose the first half inch or so. She had no energy to wrap herself around our wrists, both of her eyes were so stuck with caps that they looked faceted. We were positive that she was blind. We took her right away, paid these terrible people their money (which they were excited to use for a new bearded dragon to replace their snake), and in the car, had to talk ourselves into accepting that she truly may not survive this.
We corrected everything that same night. We filled her enclosure with leafy vines, gave her 2 new hides, a big water dish (from which she ravenously guzzled water), climbing branches, a substrate mix of coir and bark chunks, a new heat mat and thermostat, hygrometer, thermometer for her cool side, and so.much.love. we let her vibe alone in her enclosure with the corrected husbandry and it took about a week for all of her stuck shed to come off. Her tail was saved! None of it was lost despite multiple layers of dried stuck shed!! We slowly upped her food size over the course of that first month and she gained plenty of weight. She shed for us shortly after her first month here and her eye caps came off! Initially, we didn’t realize that she had stuck eye caps; we thought that her eyes had actually been misshapen, leaving her blind. We had seen stuck eye caps and this just looked… different. This picture here was taken a few days after her second shed with us and, omg, she is SO beautiful! She has a good grip, HAPPILY eats, and has gained almost 200 grams. She has lots of energy and no longer has ZERO reaction to head boops. She loves exploring our houseplants and doing nightly laps over her branches. She will almost always poke her head out of her hide to see what’s going on when you approach her enclosure and will happily come out by herself to say hi when given the chance. This weekend, we are going to start the build for her (and our other 2 rescue ball pythons’) 3x2x2 enclosures and I cant wait to share those with you!
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This is one of her BEFORE pictures from the ad.
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Another BEFORE pic
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