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Deworming snakes and mice, do you?

carol

carol

Down with the sickness
Just curious if anyone out there deworms their collection or their feeders and what they use.
smile.gif
I'm considering deworming my mice, and perhaps some of those live only feeders.

Anyone with experience?

I have three cats, all on Revolution and only one is allowed outdoors. However, I can still see how she could transfer a flea and turn, worms to the mice. Something I've been concerned about. Am I too paranoid?
 
I haven't used a dewormer on my mice, but I have used a dewormer on one of my snakes that eats live. The dewormer I used was Panacur Suspension Rx (fenbendazole).
The snake wasn't gaining any weight after meals and its stools didn't look right, so after confirmation by fecal float that there was the presence of tapeworm ova, I used the Panacur. The snakes size was 300 grams, I gave it 2ml of Panacur orally and repeated 2 weeks later. Since then, the snake has consistantly gained weight, stools look very normal and there didn't appear to be any sign of effects after giving the snake this dosage.
The Panacur can also be injected into F/T mice if you are treating snakes that eat F/T'd.
 
The only parasite your rodents could get from a cat flea MIGHT be tapeworms, but tapeworms are fairly species specific and even though you can get transfers between dogs and cats, I don't think a rodent can get them. If they had them, you would see the segments in the droppings (stretchy grains of rice when fresh, like hard brown rice when dry). And on the remote chance a mouse or rat got the species of tapeworm from the flea, it wouldn't transfer to a snake as it must go through a flea to complete it's life cycle.

All that said, there are other intestinal parasite species that you may want to deworm your snakes and rodent colony for. For snakes, there are multiple products that treat different species of intestinal parasites. Some are administered once a day for 3 days (Panacur), others are administered once. All of them should be repeated in 2 weeks. The same would apply to the rodents.

Personally, the easiest dewormer to use is ivermectin. It can be injected into the snake's meal prior to feeding for easy administration. For the rodents at Weeki Wachee (as well as the goats), we used to mix it with 50% dextrose (to cut the taste and make it more appealing to be eaten) and poured it over the food. It really wasn't dosed accurately (almost impossible to do per mouse, but easier if you take the colony as a whole), but seemed to work.

You can get ivermectin at a feed store, but probably only as an entire bottle (smallest is 100ml), which will be expensive for what you'll need. You want the one for cattle and swine as an injectable. I think the dose will be 0.1ml per 10 pounds (that's for dogs and cats, but I think it worked out that way for everything else as well), but I can check that for you. You will have to dilute it at least 1 part to 9 parts (1 tenth solution) for the snakes, maybe even more, so it may be better to just get some from your vet. You can also ask around to see if someone will sell you a few ml as dog breeders or other people with a large number of dogs (hunters) will probably have some that they use for heartworm prevention.
 
Its funny that this question should come up. Recently the gerbil society that my wife is a part of, had to do a rescue of a huge rodentry. The girl that was running it wasn't taking care of her animals very well and was going to abandon them.

When the animals were finally all cleaned up, and moved to foster it was noticed that some of them were fairly skinny. Originally it was thought that the condition the animals were in, was the problem. After a while of being properly taken care of and a very good diet, some of the animals were still losing weight. It almost seemed as if they were wasting away.

The vet that was taking care of them was perplexed, because he had never seen this in rodents. On a suggestion by my wife he did a fecal, skin and anal inspection on them. Some of the rodents showed an infestation of pin worms and roundworms. So it's possible for rodents to become infested with internal parasites.

For oral medications used to treat the worms, they would put drops of the medication on the nose of the individual animals and when the rodents worked to clean it off, it would ingest the medication. As previously mentioned, it's almost impossible to accurately dose the animals, but the majority of the gerbils in the rescued collection, survived.

Wayne
 
As I figured, the dose for mice, rats, snakes and just about every other exotic is the same...200-400μg/kg by mouth. For mice and rats, repeat in 8-10 days (didn't know that) but repeat in 2 weeks for snakes. And because it confuses people (including me), 1% ivermectin has 10mg/ml and 1μg (microgram) = 0.001mg. And why they can't just say the dose is 0.2-0.4mg/kg I'll never know. That all translates to 0.09-0.18mg/lb - easy dose at low range is 0.1mg/lb = 1mg/10lb = 0.1ml of 1% ivermectin per 10lbs, which is what I thought it probably was in the first place, but I just proved it to myself.

I need my coffee.
 
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