When I started in the hobby, I first used indoor/outdoor carpeting. Looked ok, and was easy to replace (had two pieces, would take out the dirty one, pop in the clean one right away and wash the dirty one).... but for more than one cage that gets to be a hassle, and dried feces was hard to scrub out of the carpet.

So once I started getting more snakes, I switched to aspen. Fairly easy, but messy, splinters would stick to my clothes when cleaning. One of my snakes got a splinter lodged between his nostrils after striking at prey, which got infected and had to be aspirated at the vet (and he's got a scar now as a result), and so I changed from aspen shavings to CareFresh small animal bedding (it's a soft shredded cellulose product, like little clumps of paper towel). That is what I'm currently using. It is very absorbent, almost too much so (I mist my boa cages every other day as a result to keep humidity at an acceptable level). It's a processed fiber product (probably gets boiled at the factory as part of the manufacturing process), so it won't have the bugs aspen might. It's comparable to "Desert Snow" bedding which you'll find in the reptile section - but getting a big bale of CareFresh in the small animal section of a pet store is MUCH cheaper than Desert Snow and is pretty much the same product, except for color.

The problem I have with the CareFresh type bedding is that my snakes all grab a big "tailful" of it when I take them out of their cages, and then they dump it on the floor. No big deal, it's easy to clean up but still annoying.

So going forward, especially since I will be attempting to breed a pair of boas this winter, I will be getting dimpled kraft paper from Uline soon as well.
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Lauren Madar
www.ophidiagems.com
1.1 Hog Island Boas
1.1 Hypo BCI
0.1 Sorong-type GTP
1.0 Normal Ball Python

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