Quote Originally Posted by mattfish View Post
Just like i have been trying to say, even if you do everything right and buy only store bought stuff there is still ALWAYS a risk. diseases are everywhere so to worry about them is pointless. use a little common sense and cross your fingers. I choose to make sure my frog has immunities to almost everything possible, that is the best decision to me.
i am sorry to hear about your loss!!
There are many diseases and parasites that NO amount of prevention will help you, and by the time you figure out something is wrong it can be inherently too late. There are ALWAYS risks anywhere you go, but the difference with many of these feeder farms are the fact they watch carefully over their livestock.. if you think they (the feeder farm owners) don't pay attention to 20 people phonecalling them saying "my animal has _______ disease now and I ONLY buy my crickets from you! You no longer get my money thanks to my vet bills!" then you're out of your mind. Many people have very expensive, exotic animals reaching in the thousands of dollars and won't hesitate to seek compensation in the event something like this pops up.. which is exactly why many of those farms are careful about things. While there's certainly no set way of doing things, I'd say you're walking right into trouble for obvious reasons. Look at it this way - that's like me "boosting my immune system" for all the diseases here and heading straight over to Africa with no fear of Malaria because "I prepared myself". Do you know how ridiculous that is? There's a reason why immunizations are required when you do that sort of traveling.. because we as humans JUST LIKE ANIMALS don't have a "one size fits all" immune system. Genetics don't work that way, even in frogs. They may be better than a lot of animals out there, but we're just talking about some types diseases and parasites... we're not including the other stuff like ground contamination from pollution or fertilizers, or any other man-made synthetics ingested/passed on to the frog. That stuff will also take a giant toll on your animals (if not worse). Nobody here is disagreeing with you because you chose to make a different decision from us; we disagree with you as a collective whole because what you're doing lacks common sense. You can't reinvent the wheel of genetics and we can't either. It takes many generations to see any remote changes in disease tolerance, and that's assuming all conditions are hypothetically equivalent.