Difficult decisions are best made early.

[hazliya]

elenuial let me know the other night that come the next academic year, after he gets his first round of grad school done, he's looking to be somewhere distinctly Not Worcester. So far, the places he's looking at are in California, Arizona, and Wisconsin. Maybe a few places in Cambridge (which I'm hoping for), but just not here.

This raises a lot of issues, but one in particular: the animals. Now, a dog can be moved cross-country fairly easily, as he'll be over a year old and a CGX/CGC by then (hopefully both), and is fairly independent. Snakes, however, get stressed quickly and it's very difficult to keep a giant glass tank in the backseat AND keep it thermo-regulated on a cross-country drive. Not to mention that a lot of apartment buildings don't take kindly to snakes, even ones that max out at 12-18".

This leaves me with the unhappy idea of rehoming the snakes. This sucks, especially considering how young and awesome they are, but the prospects of bringing them anywhere are pretty grim.

If any of you would be interested in potentially taking them in sometime, feel free to let me know. They're nosy, docile, and very sweet babies who require minimal upkeep. If they get fed once a week and get to come out and play once in a while, they're happy. It upsets me that even though they're such easy animals, the idea of putting them at risk by moving them long-distance makes it not worth endangering their welfare.

I'm going to miss them something fierce.

Comments

[mindways]

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that you'll end up in Cambridge... but failing that, keshwyn and I might well be able to give them a home. (We've kicked around the notion of getting a snake for a few years, so it's not an unappealing idea. :)

The caveats:
* We'd want to meet them (and look at their required setup) before giving a firm commitment;
* We'd want you to go over "how to take care of them" with us (and if you have a recommendation for a useful reference book, get that);
* We are likely to be moving sometime in the next 4-24 months. We're not going more than a 30-40 minute drive away, so we can bring them with us - but we'd want to manage timing so that we didn't move them and then immediately have to move them again, to avoid stressing them out.

I think keshwyn has a few more thoughts; I'll let her post those herself.

[keshwyn]

As I told mindways, "I'd be taking over somebody else's pets - I'd have a responsibility to both them and to their former owner to take good care of them!"

So, in addition to meeting them, and getting the lecture on how to take care of them, I'd like to make sure *you* would be OK with us taking them. This'd likely include helping us make sure we didn't inadvertently make a dumb beginner's mistake on where to put their enclosure, etc.

But, um...Oo, snakes. :)

[juldea.livejournal.com]

Would they live happily in a house with both cats and degus? Because that's what we'll have by that time. But that given, I'm happy to also throw my name in the hat.