It really is just what your needs are. If you are keeping one for display/personal enjoyment a sand or gravel or mixture of both works just fine and most definitely looks best in a natural display for the species. If I were going to do a display myself, I would just use play sand with large rocks placed how you like for shelters and such. Play sand dries fecal matter quickly and can be easily spot cleaned with a shop vac/long tube attachment. It's drawback is weight. Although they inhabit many enviroments fro desert to lower pine forset I most often see atrox in washes cratered in the sand waiting for dinner to come by. Sand and gravel mix looks good too,but will be harder to clean.I have never had a problem of any kind with snad and I jhave kept snakes on it for forty years. For the first twenty or so I used it almost exclusively.

Those who keep numbers of snakes tend to prefer stuff like aspen as it is absorbent, lightweight and easy to clean. I use a mixture. I have always liked pine for it's odor killing ability. I have never had any trouble with it and I have used it in my breeder racks for kingsnakes and boas for most of my life. With rattlesnakes however it gets pushed around too much and looks messy. I really liie aspen as it packs nicely and forms a mat, but it isn't that great for odor absoption. I now make a mix of pine and aspen (75% aspen/25% pine) which together makes a nice matted substrate and has good odor absorption (my wife has a nose like a bloodhound)Don't use cedar, it can cause a lot of problems! Spot cleaning is easy,I just use the shop vac with tube attachment. I don't have to get anywhere near the snakes or remove them from the cage. They usually don't even budge from their coil. I then just rearrange the bedding a little to cover the crater made by the shop vac. Every couple of cleanings of course I remove the snake, suck all the bedding out, and give it a thorough cleaning/change of bedding. I try to find that balance between easy to maintain (I have a very crazy work schedule) and halfway pleasant to look at, lol. It's a molossus pic but this is how most of my crote cages basically look...



Rich

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