Feeding Boxes...

As a new snake owner, I was open to the advice that any experienced snake handlers could give me. One such piece of advice, however, I learned was not necessarily a practical practice. This was regarding the subject of feeding boxes.

The general theory behind feeding boxes is that a person would feed their snake inside the feeding box instead of in its cage so as the snake would not associate the cage opening with food and attack its owner by mistake. It made sense enough to me, so I gave it a try.

Unfortunately, the feeding box method proved to present me with two new challenges - aggressive or odd behavior inside the feeding boxes and that it was highly discouraged to "handle" a snake after it had eaten (especially boa constrictors because it could cause them to regurgitate their meal) and there was no way to get the snake back from the feeding box and into its enclosure without handling it.

Now, I had been using the "feeding box" method with Shiva for a good three months before Quetzalcoatl came to live with me. For Shiva, I took the lid of an old paper box and sat her inside and fed her there. It worked fine for a while but over time several issues began to arise.

One of these issues was that it was as if Shiva wanted me to assist her in eating. She had taken her rats back or butt first a couple of times (makes swallowing very very difficult) and after that, she would bite and constrict her food, and then drop it and look back and forth between me and the rat until I pointed to the nose of the rat. As soon as I had pointed to the nose of the rat she would dart her head over and take it down head first. After a few weeks of this odd behavior, she would take the head of the rat in her mouth, slither over to me and press it against my leg to help her swallow faster by allowing her to take bigger bites.

This behavior struck me as very very odd, and very unnatural, so I would dangle her rats until she bit and constricted and then I would leave the kitchen (I always fed her on the kitchen floor). That was when Shiva began to bite, constrict, and then drag the rat into the living room. All of this became such a headache to me, I finally just started giving her food inside her enclosure. Generally, I would just get her attention with the rat and then lay it down (on a paper towel so as to keep substrate off of it) inside the cage and she just ate off the floor of the cage with no problems. All other problems with feeding her ceased instantly. Yay for feeding inside the cage!

In Quetzalcoatl's case, I used Shiva's traveling box (a Sterillite tub with a handle for carrying in the top) as his feeding box. Everything went generally smoothe with him for a while. I would drop him in, close the lid, and the instant that lid opened up again he was in feeding response and would viciously and violently strike his food (hissing madly as he did) and then I would close the lid again and wait for him to swallow.

The problem I had then, however, was that he was still in feeding mode when I would open the lid again to get him out. I had to tap him on the head with a long spoon to get him out of feeding mode before I could pick him up and put him back in his feeding box. Because of this, around the same time I stopped using the feeding box for Shiva, I stopped using it for Quetzalcoatl as well.

The result of discontinuing the use of feeding boxes is that neither of my snakes were cage or food agressive (as I had been told they would be if I fed them in the cages), I finally had the peace of mind that I didn't have to handle them after meals, and they both ate off the floor of their cages consistantly. In fact, neither snake has shown more than an occasional, once every three or so month, agressive feeding response since the switch to feeding inside the cages. However, I do take my snakes out to slither around, to have their cages cleaned, etc. Therefore, they don't associate the cage opening with food.

(Videos: Quetzalcoatl in the feed box)

Enter Quetzalcoatl!

It was a cold, blistery Tuesday morning in January. I awoke bright and early, eager with anticipation, and made my way to the main office of my apartment complex. "Jackie?" I said. "If a package arrives for me, can you call me on my cellphone right away? I'm waiting for a baby snake." "A snake?! Well... of course we'll let you know right away!" I returned to my apartment and waited... and waited... time seemed to drag.

Finally, at around 10:00 a.m. the phone rang. My baby had arrived! My heart pounded in my chest as I ran down to the office to retrieve the tiny package. The box was marked "Perishable" (I'll say!) and had all sorts of arrows and care warnings all over it. I rushed it up to my apartment, carefully cut the box open, pried up the Styrofoam insulation, and dug through crumpled up newspaper to find the tiny cloth bag that held the precious snakeling inside.

I slowly opened the bag and peered inside to see two beautiful red eyes looking back at me. His tiny pink tongue flicked as he sat virtually motionless for several minutes before the tiny albino stretched his head up to look out of the bag he had traveled in. He was absolutely gorgeous! Pictures had not done him any justice at all.

As I was placing him into his enclosure, I felt his stomach was empty and hollow as if he hadn't eaten in a long time and his tummy gurgled as he slithered from my hands. He hadn't been in his enclosure for more than 10 minutes when he started hissing at me and mouth-displaying.

Despite what many people had told me about giving a new snake a break-in period before attempting to feed it, my new baby, Quetzalcoatl seemed very hungry (I figured that one of the main reasons he was grumpy, besides not knowing me, was that he hadn't been fed). I thawed him out a rat pup and offered it to him. He took it instantly! Bitten and constricted! He sucked that thing down like a kid eating gummy bears.

When he was finishing swallowing, I noticed that a piece of his substrate had gotten into his mouth. I was afraid he might ingest it, so I used a pair of chopsticks to pick the piece of wood from his mouth as he yawned to realign his jaw. It was probably a bad mood, because he was instantly angry with me. He hissed and struck at me a couple of times before I closed his tub for the night.

Over time, I sat next to Quetzalcoatl's cage and occasionally stroked him while he hissed angrily at me. I did this several times a day, every day until he had fully calmed down because I did not want him to learn that a little bit of moodiness would get him his way. Over the two weeks Quetzalcoatl transformed from a scared, vocal, and seemingly aggressive snakeling to probably one of the most tame, docile, and lovable snakes I have ever met.

(Photos: First: Quetzalcoatl in his bag in the lap of one of my dolls, Second & Third: Quetzalcoatl in his new enclosure

Adding to the Family...

One day, while reading the posts on the forum I frequented, I noticed some ads for snakes for sale at the bottom of the page. What caught my eye was a beautiful baby albino boa constrictor. He was gorgeous! Absolutely gorgeous... and $1000 worth of gorgeous. Could I justify spending $1000 on a snake? Maybe. After all, I did justify spending $500+ on dolls. But where would I get the money? I only had about half that... I could save it up over a month, but the snake might be gone by then.

The baby albino was all I could think or talk about for many days, and finally, my boyfriend (at the time) told me to go ahead and buy the boa and he would pay for half. So I contacted the seller and he agreed to let me send him a down payment of half and send him the other half a week later (when my boyfriend was supposed to get the money to me).

Excited, Shiva and I went to the pet store (and Target) to get the heat, housing and substrate for the new snake. We picked up a 105 gallon Sterilite tub, ZooMed Jungle Bedding, a blue baby blanket (Shiva had a green one) to use as a hide, a large water dish that looked like a stone, ZooMed Under Tank Heater, and Shiva picked out a climbing tree (I let her slither to the one she liked). We brought everything back home and drilled holes in the tub and set up the new cage.

A week passed and my boyfriend never gave me the money. When I asked about it, he argued with me and told me that he wasn't going to give me the money because he never had any intention of actually paying for half of the snake. PANIC! I instantly contacted the seller of the albino snake and asked him to give me more time. He agreed to give me a few more weeks and the majority of my following paycheck went to paying the rest of the money for the snake.

Yet another week passed after the final payment was sent and no word, no contacts, no e-mails, and no snake. Finally, I called the seller as he wasn't returning my e-mails asked about the snake. "Oh, I didn't want to send him without knowing someone would be there to pick him up." So arrangements were made for my new baby to arrive the following Tuesday and thus began the long, 4-day wait.

(Photos: First: Shiva checking out Quetzalcoatl's profile on his 'for-sale' page. Second: Shiva inspecting the new enclosure.)