[GarterGuy]

Hey Marian,
Sounds like you've got a good thing going with your vet (it's soo hard to find a good herp vet, had one here, but she moved away...really sucks!) and it's sounding like your T.ordinoides (aka. "Bob's Pugets") are on the road to recovery. I wish you all the best with them and like GarterKing had stated, hopefully you and the others on the site who were able to get there Blues too pull through, can be a source of nice, HEALTHY, captive bred offspring in the future.
As for "Bob", I've now seen him on other classifieds selling other species of snakes (not just garters)....he's going to continue to do this as long as people are going to continue to buy. Unfortunately, there have always been and will always be "Bobs" out there who operate like this. It's not so much that he was selling wild caught animals....that's to be expected from a group of snakes that's not well established as captive bred animals, yet......it's the fact that he was falsely representing them as being well and healthy and had given very poor advice on caring and treating them. If he had just said, "Wild caught Puget gaters, not treated for parasites, ect.", then it wouldn't have been misleading to have bought from him and had problems with the animals. He knew he wouldn't be able to sell them if he was honest.....so he went the other route and here's were the problem lies. Well again, my only comment on all this is "buyer beware".....if you get animals from some guy named "Bob" (never did give a last name and I actually got emails from him at the start from two different addresses!) over the computer, with no history of the animals or himself, you could be in to be screwed! Personally, I'm sticking to people I know and trust.
Roy