Passive Smoking?

[Bubbles]

hey everyone i had a thought the other day about passive smoking.

i unfortunately am a smoker (I'm trying to stop) my girlfriend and granddad is also.

we live in a small bungalow and i was just wondering i no about second hand smoke being dangours to others but what about snakes.

do you think me and girlfriend smoking in the same room as a snake would effect it?

I'm pretty sure it probably does. (reason why i don't smoke in the same room and windows are open)

Anyway whats your thoughts on this subject? will it do damage? will it do no harm? :shrugs:

 

[Hurley]

I'll paste this from another thread on the subject where I posted.

Honestly, snakes in general already seem to be quite prone to respiratory infections (RI). Stress is enough to induce an RI, so we try to minimize that as much as possible by reducing the dustiness of our substrates, providing adequate ventilation, and appropriate humidities.

Cigarette smoke can be a huge irritant to the lungs, just like it can be in people. I know that if I am in a building with smokers, I spend the entire time with an itchy throat, coughing, eyes watering, and nose running. I'm more sensitive to it than most and have sensitive eyes anyway, but that's a reaction in a perfectly healthy human just being around smoke. We count on our immune systems to surround the smoke particles and then ride the mucociliary apparatus (the little "mucous escalator) up our tracheas to have us either swallow the mucous containing the smoke or cough it out. Smoke puts a tremendous workload on our natural defenses and susceptible people and animals can get stressed enough by it to affect their health.

Snakes have the added bonus of not having a mucociliary apparatus. They don't have those little cells bringing the mucous up out of their lungs like we do. This is why it is recommended for a snake with an RI to have plenty of things to climb on, they have to rely on getting their bodies elevated and hanging their heads to let the crud come up out of their lung by gravity. That's also why you see snakes with severe RI's slinging their heads back and forth trying to expel the mucous and pus. (Which in itself is quite distressing to watch and is generally a bad sign.) These guys just don't have a good setup for respiration to begin with, they can't take a lot of added stressors, it's best to minimize the irritation and workload on their respiratory system by smoking elsewhere. Remember, they don't have the option of getting up and walking out of the room.

 

[Bubbles]

very interesting cheers for that Hurley thats just answerd my thoughts and questions exacily. im definatly not going to smoke around my snakes espeshialy now i seen that. i didnt think it would cause that much of a bad effect but reading that it seams to make perfect sence it would.

thanks.

p.s. Im going to give up for sure now.