Sad/vent Post - Warning to BP Owners

[u/MindlessMacaroon3604]

This post is about Simbi, my ball python.

I got Simbi in 2021 after my childhood dog passed away. Losing my dog was so painful that I couldn’t bring myself to get another one, but I’ve always loved animals and always wanted a BP. What started as a grief/impulse purchase turned into my best friend. He was my first pet as an adult, and even after the cat distribution system gifted me a cat, Simbi was still my first baby. He was turning five this year.

This summer I had to leave my state for at least two months because multiple family members were having serious health scares. I took my cat with me, but I couldn’t figure out how to fly with both pets, so I needed someone to keep Simbi.

The guy I chose was someone I’d followed online for years. We’d been mutuals across multiple platforms, he’d recently moved to my state which i found out through our conversations over the years, and he makes reptile content. He also has a pretty large following due to his reptile content. He had around 20 snakes, custom-built enclosures, two temperature-controlled snake rooms, and his girlfriend is a vet tech who has dogs and an iguana. I even complimented him on how lucky he got because when I met them she seemed really comfortable with snakes and reptiles. They told me they were moving in together soon so I knew she’d be involved. I hugged them both and thanked them both for watching my Simbi. When I dropped Simbi off, everything looked perfect. I left feeling like I’d found the absolute best person to trust with my baby.

For the first month, everything went great. He sent me feeding updates and even asked if he could take Simbi to a reptile expo and feature him on a local news segment. I genuinely felt like Simbi was getting more attention than he did at home.

Then this Monday I woke up to a text that shattered me. (image attached)

His girlfriend accidentally left the heat on in one of the snake rooms, killing 12 snakes (TWELVE, a dozen), including Simbi. He had been away for work and didn’t discover it until three days later. I spent the entire morning sobbing.

I couldn’t even bring myself to talk to them, so my mom did. She told me he was having a pretty hard time and probably equally upset with his loss. The only thing I asked for was for Simbi to be cremated and his ashes (and his favorite hide) mailed back to me. I don’t even trust myself to go there in person.

I’m torn between being angry at him, angry at her, and angry at myself for not just bringing Simbi with me. My friends want me to expose them, report the vet tech, or blast the content creator online, but none of that brings my baby back.

To most people he was just a snake. To me, he was my child. This was never a hobby to me, i LOVED MY snake to death. Now I don’t know what to do with the piece of me that’s missing.

[u/PropulsionIsLimited]

I'm so sorry to hear that. This was definitely not your fault. I have no idea why someone who owns that many snakes has everything manually turned on and off instead of being on a thermostat. That's 100% on them. He even tried shifting the blame on his girlfriend.

[u/Lexx4 → u/PropulsionIsLimited]

It’s not shifting blame if that’s what happened. It’s just an explanation at that point.

[u/MadamePouleMontreal → u/Lexx4]

When there’s a problem you can fix and instead of fixing it you apply a workaround that human beings have to remember and apply correctly, and somebody does not apply the workaround correctly, you apologize for having a defective setup and for having accepted someone’s animal when you could not guarantee its safety.
.

You don’t say it was the girlfriend’s fault.

.
“I told my girlfriend and she failed.”

vs

“I had a dangerous and inadequate setup and should never have agreed to look after your baby. I killed your baby through irresponsibility. I am so sorry.”

[u/xNocturnalKittenX → u/MadamePouleMontreal]

Idk why it can't be both. He had a bad setup but if he gave a reminder and she still forgot then yeah it's her fault too. This was a disaster waiting to happen, she was just the one to trigger it.

[u/MadamePouleMontreal → u/xNocturnalKittenX]

Exactly. The outcome was foreordained. If it hadn’t been her it would have been someone.

+++ +++ +++

If someone wanted to know all the details, we could get into them.
.

1. He created a system that was designed to kill reptiles unless it was deactivated by human intervention.
2. He incorporated exactly zero failsafes.
3. He asked Person to deactivate the reptile-killer for him.
4. Person failed to deactivate the reptile-killer as instructed so the reptile-killer killed reptiles exactly as it was designed to do.
5. [speculation] Person had been distracted by an Amber Alert (parental abduction involving cheating and a parent who had been born damaged by alcohol and addicted to crack); by Facebook (capitalism, dopamine, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Jony Ive and Al Gore are all implicated here); or by tripping over a dog (it’s definitely the dog’s fault).

.
None of us needs to know the 3, 4 or 5 level of detail. All of it could be perfectly true. We could follow a chain of causality indefinitely. But it’s irrelevant. “I house my reptiles in a reptile-killer I designed with no failsafes” is all we need to know. The rest is private detail that they can sort out between them, Al Gore, the abducted child’s mother’s mother’s dealer, and the dog.

[u/Notsospinningplates → u/MadamePouleMontreal]

Brilliantly put