Pretty Fishies

Hi! This is a great question and I’ve been meaning to talk about this paper for a while. A few years back, this and a similar study (by the same people I think) regarding social preferences of domestic bettas by color (same color vs different color) went around fishblr for a while, and I’ve seen it be used to claim that sororities with domestic bettas are okay.

After reading and rereading the paper, I disagree that this paper provides evidence that domestics are social.

This is going to be long, so let’s go under a cut.

To this:

Before he would patrol the back and front of the tank incessantly, but once I got more plants and really packed out his tank, he stopped immediately. He started to explore his surroundings instead of pacing back and forth all the time. Now he lives in this:

And he’s the happiest he’s ever been, I think. He spends 99% of his time exploring all over the tank. Usually I can’t even find him. He’s busy doing his own thing, instead of spending his entire day pacing back and forth in one spot. 

its such a GORGEOUS moth that not a lot of people seem to know about and i just??? god what a beauty

Tons of people think that stuck shed is no big deal. If their snake has stuck shed, they can easily take care of it with a sauna treatment. If it happens again, then no big deal they will treat the problem again. This is not fully taking care of the problem, however, this is only treating a symptom of incorrect husbandry. Without a change in the way you do things, you will continually be fixing stuck shed.

Old skin that hasn’t sloughed off can cause problems for the snake. It’s itchy and uncomfortable but it can also cut off circulation and cause permanent damage. Below is a photo of a male ball python’s hemipenes that are essentially destroyed due to chronic stuck shed problems from someone who wouldn’t fix their humidity:

Here is a photo of healthy hemipenes:

Chacoan burrowing frog (Chacophrys pierotti), a relative of the more popular horned frogs, from Paraguay.

I have several thoughts about the sort of layperson who likes to claim we ‘overvaccinate’ and talk about ‘harmful chemicals’, but it’s probably best I keel them to myself. Wouldn’t want to offend anyone.

But I’m guessing you don’t actually want to know what I think about the people, and more whether I think there’s any merit to the discussion.

Vaccines are hotly debated in veterinary medicine, and by people wanting a ‘natural’ lifestyle. I really don’t bother with the sensationalist ‘natural’ groups and instead prefer to focus on scientific data and my own first hand experience.

The topic of overvaccination comes up again and again, largely due to the existence of rare but significant adverse effects. See this post from earlier today for that discussion.

Absolutely everything we use in veterinary medicine has the potential to cause harm, and even if that potential is small, we should be assessing how much we should be using to minimize the risk: benefit ratio.

There are a couple of hurdles within the industry in regards to minimising our vaccination use, and I will go over them, but I want to emphasize the vaccination schedules of puppies and kittens are not up for debate. These are our most at-risk group of disease, with the most benefits and the least risks. Don’t skip the vaccinations for these juvenile animals. These discussions are about adult animals.

Immunity duration is variable

So, we used to vaccinate for everything once a year. For some vaccines we still do, because we can only prove they provide immunity for about a year, or in some cases (kennel cough, FIV) they only just provide immunity for a year.

But our core vaccines (parvo, distemper, hepatitis, rabies, panleukopenia, calicivirus and sort-of feline herpes) seem to fairly consistently provide immunity for more than a year. Some of them provide immunity for more than three years. Some of them, in some dogs, can provide immunity for nine years.

But… which diseases and which animals?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

You just don’t know if you don’t measure, because there’s no way to predict it.

We can measure immunity provided by the core vaccines with titre testing, but you still need to measure it every year. There is a long potential research delay in assessing the duration of immunity from a vaccine too. Basically, if you want to know whether a vaccine can provide immunity for nine years, that research experiment is going to take at least nine years, and then you have to get the product registered for that use.

There’s also the issue of what do you do if the titres are good for most pathogens, but too low for just one of them. At the moment, we would vaccinate for all of them.

Multi-antigen vs single-antigen

We often talk about our companion animal vaccines in terms of C3, C5, F3, F4, F5. These abbreviations basically tell us what’s in them, for example a C3 is a Canine vaccine with 3 things in it.

At the moment, if a patient of mine needs a booster for only one component of a vaccine that contains three things in it, I don’t have access to a vaccine for only one pathogen, except for parvovirus and that’s a killed vaccine, not a modified-live, so it’s offered immunity is lesser.

So if I titre test a patient and it needs one out of three things boostered, I still have to boost all three. So technically this is providing more vaccination than it needs, but I just don’t have an alternative right now.

Route of administration

How we give our vaccines is changing, and for good reason. There are lots of different types of antibodies in the body, not just because they protect against different pathogens, but because the antibodies go to different places. For example, some antibodies float around the blood, some line your respiratory tract and some line your gut. If an animal consistently is exposed to a pathogen in one particular location (eg gut) then it will have more of those appropriate antibodies in that location, because that’s where it keeps running into it.

So we have intra-nasal bordatella vaccines (kennel cough). You squirt the vaccine down the dog’s nose. In theory, you get more immunity where you want it, and less systemic reactions.

In practice, you often get a dog that sneezes and you risk shedding live bordatella into the environment, where there may be at risk humans.

Also, if the dog is aggressive, I’m not squirting something down its nose.

The future might have more oral vaccines for pathogens picked up by the oral route, and I think this is potentially a good thing for a number of reasons (more effective, targeted immunity, less scary needles that people don’t like) but there will always be a place for injectable vaccines.

However, these vaccines with a different route of administration don’t necessarily cause the same rise in blood titres, so measuring their effectiveness is a little more difficult.

Regional risk factors

Where an animal lives and its lifestyle will change which vaccines are optimal for it to have. I don’t routinely vaccinate dogs for leptospirosis, living in suburbia as I do, but if that dog lived on a dairy farm or piggery, you can bet your hat that I would vaccinate it for lepto.

In my current location we haven’t seen a parvo case for many blessed years, but in my first job there were constant outbreaks from one particular suburb. Here we happily do tri-annual vaccines for parvo, but over there nobody was comfortable vaccinating less for a disease that was claiming so many dogs, pups and adults alike.

Indoor-only cats are less at risk of FIV, so we often don’t vaccinate them for that, so overvaccination is relative to the animal’s lifestyle, as is undervaccination.

I know a breeder that prefered her stud dog to have a kennel cough vaccine every 9 months, because immunity didn’t quite last the full 12 months, he met lots of other dog and she didn’t want to risk a fever dropping his sperm count at any time.

In conclusion

Most people that are saying “most vaccines are unnecessary and you should only get the legal ones because the rest have harmful chemicals?” are probably not talking about any of these topics. They are probably just anti-vaccine and anti-modern medicine in general, and want an opportunity to poop on vets, so have picked a topic that has a little bit of genuine validity, and modified it to suit them.

There’s not actually much debate about “should we vaccinate” but more “how and when should we vaccinate”. Customising your protocol for an individual animal is ok, based on your local risk factors, but you always need to use a vaccine as labeled.

This’ll be the first in a series of (who knows how many or how often) write ups concerning common disorders and diseases of exotic pets. All posts will be tagged with “exotics write up” for easy searching. I’m starting with wet tail because we actually did cover this one in class and I think the causative agent is really interesting. It’s actually quite difficult to find reliable information about exotic pet diseases online. I had a hard time finding veterinary sources.

Wet tail, or proliferative ileitis, is caused by Lawsonia intracellularis, an obligate intracellular, gram negative bacteria that also causes proliferative enteritis in pigs. Stress from poor husbandry, overcrowding, sudden diet changes, or rough handling may contribute to the development of wet tail. Clinical signs include matting around the tail, diarrhea, irritability, foul odor, lethargy, lack of interest in food, dehydration, and hunched stance. If you suspect your hamster has wet tail, contact your vet immediately as it is very easy for such a tiny animal to dehydrate and die quickly.

In 3-10 week old Syrian hamsters, wet tail is the most significant cause of intestinal disease and can have very high mortality rates. Wet tail is treated by correcting dehydration and electrolyte imbalances, followed with antibiotics and force feeding. Common antibiotics used are enrofloxacin, TMS, and doxycycline.

I have a lot of stuff in the socialization tags, but the best advice I can give you is to treat them like nonverbal 5 year old children.

Pigeons who are not already human social will be afraid, cannot be force tamed.

You have to build your relationship up with them slowly and be openly verbally comunicative in a soft, relaxed tone.

Pigeons are intensely social pattern mappers. Language is a pattern of naming objects, places, people, actions, and concepts, and pigeons are hard wired to map those patterns exactly like a human toddler.

So, believe it or not, the best way to socialize individual pigeons is to talk to it like a toddler. Identify the things it’s looking at, interacting with, or doing. Name people it sees. Name rooms it visits. Name places you take it and tell it what is going on. 

It will pick up your communication, if you are consistent.

An important thing to verbally differentiate early on is needs from want.

If you HAVE to pick it up, say to return it to its enclosure, trim overgrown nails, or remove a tangled hair from its toes, tell it “I need to x”. Do the thing as quickly as you are able, and then let the bird up.

Ask permission for anything you don’t need to do and allow your pidge to consent or decline.

“Ankhou, can I pet you?” “Wanna step up?” “Could/would you c’mere?” all use language that implies a choice. Stepping forward, bowing his head, or being still are consenting. Turning his back is a decline. Walking away is an EMPHATIC decline.

It is important that I respect his decline.

NEVER ask “want to?” when you “need to” do something. 

They learn language through the context of its use and will very quickly pick up that “I need” and “can I?/may I?will you/would you/could you, and wanna?” are different things.

Kombucha - Leopard 66% ph blood (boa imperator)