Other than a few health problems/mistakes, anxiety-after-the-fact over buying from people without checking their feedback first (happened a few times-too-many, but has since been corrected), and a few shipping “scares”, I think the worst by far would have to be when I was just getting into keeping snakes long-term. I’d had them sporadically growing up, and even a few years there prior to this story, but since no job = no money, they usually got sold off pretty quick. As much as I hate to admit that.
Anyway it was about 5 years ago, so the details are a bit fuzzy, but I remember I spent about a month or two at least digging through kingsnake and faunaclassifieds trying to find the perfect snake to start with, the one that would be with me until the end because I wanted to prove to myself that I could actually stick with it before getting further into the hobby. And then I found him. A 2 year old ghost corn snake male. If I remember correctly he was fairly darkly colored, so probably not the “best” example of a ghost at the time, but he had quite a fair bit of pink on him, and it was the darker color I think that initially grabbed my attention.
Immediately I contacted the seller, got a ship date worked out, and waited for my boy to get here. And he did. But the seller shipped him with a heat pack in the middle of summer with no holes in the box. I knew as soon as I cut open the box that something wasn’t right because you could faintly smell the rot through the top of the styrofoam lid.
That was my first, and thankfully only, DOA.
I don’t have any hard feelings toward the seller though. He was polite and responsive from beginning to end, and ultimately handled the situation very well in the end and refunded me. And to be fair it could have come down to a mistake on his part, shipping on the wrong day (though I’m certain we had waited for it to cool off), or a freak temperature spike in transit. Who knows, but it very nearly made me quit the hobby.
Thankfully I didn’t, because a few months after this I ended up getting a bloodred ghost male from another seller, but damn, it was a close thing. I even tried to find another ghost corn that looked just like the first male. I didn’t want something different. I didn’t want that first DOA to be a sign that after buying and selling so many snakes while growing up that I wouldn’t be able to stick with it.
But then I found Cecil. And then 8 months after that it was my western hognose, Stormfly. And now I’m up to 18 snakes, 6 of which are babies that I produced myself.
I know this got really long winded and kind of odd, though, so I’m sorry about that. Once I got thinking about it again I kind of couldn’t stop. But! Here’s a picture of Cecil as he is today, since I don’t have any of that original ghost male: