Quote:
Originally Posted by JuliusSqueezer
It's forced breathing/cough/sneeze...could be caused by blocked nostrils due to the skin popping loose for shed inside the nostrils but that's typically not very loud or cause any serious labored breathing...usually just a light wheeze or whistle when it's nose skin flaking off...or it could be blocked trachea/hacking up phlegm. They don't have a diaphragm so it's hard for them to clear the airway and usually they just aren't very effective in doing so. This is why lower respiratory infections are so dangerous. If it continues and you start seeing yellow gunk splattering the cage walls and glass, drop the humidity and raise the ambient temp to about 91 degrees 24/7 immediately and get him some antibiotics asap....Lower RI (Pneumonia) isn't always as outwardly evident as upper RI. With upper RI, you will usually see a lot of runny snot and open mouth breathing/wheezing. Typically upper precedes lower but not always....or the upper symptoms sometimes go unnoticed and the infection moves deeper because it wasn't treated...
Another possibility is parasites. Many parasites larva that live in the gut as adults, burrow through the skin and get in the blood...travel to the lungs and live there drinking blood till they pupate. Then right as they are becoming adults, they will crawl up the trachea, out of the epiglottis and into the back of the mouth/top of the throat where they are swallowed into the stomach and latch on once they get in the intestinal track where they lay eggs into passing feces, continue drinking blood (1 adult hookworm can drink up to 1 full cc of blood per day) Anyway, at the stage where they are coming up through the glottis to crawl over into the esophagus...they will often cause some hacking/coughing/as you describe howling. It's not hard to imagine a glob of worms coming up your trach and into your mouth as being something uneventful for any animal. I imagine it's quite uncomfortable.
Next time you get poop, I'd get a fecal done pronto.
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Sorry but I am going to have to strongly disagree with you on this one. Have you ever heard of a RI so severe that it sounded like a cell phone vibrating on a pile of change when you walked by? Probably not. I'm pretty sure if an animal did have an RI that severe and was still alive that it would be exhibiting some sort of mucus or fluid from either the mouth or nostrils. Symptoms that haven't been described yet.
I wil agree with you about the possibility of parasites causing symptoms of that sort though. Heather and Owen also seem to have experienced what I was refering to in my post. It really does sound like multiple loud forced burps. The female I had do it only did it 3 times and has never done it since. It's a very scary unnatural sound to hear coming from a boas cage.
