I know this is a little late in the thread, so you might not see this, but here's hoping.

If you do EXACTLY what Jenny described in using bleach, then that method should be safe enough. A lot of people are not that picky or precise when working with bleach though, so I would advise caution - there is no such thing as "good enough" when you are talking about rinsing bleach from a cage. You really need to rinse it until you cannot detect that there was bleach in there.

That's why I don't like to use bleach; I prefer to use vinegar to clean cages. Walmart and any old grocery store you can come across sells distilled white vinegar in gallon jugs. This is a good deal! It is inexpensive, and very effective. Vinegar kills bacteria quite well, and cleans up not only animal messes, but hard water scaling very nicely. If you have a lot of hard water stains built up, then it would work best if you can soak the stained area with vinegar for a while before you scrub on it. Vinegar is a weak acid, so keep in mind that it will cause mild corrosion on conductive metals like copper (it isn't anything destructive, but makes neat colors where you might not expect them). The great thing about it being a weak acid though, is that it's strength is greatly diminished by dilution - so rinsing once or twice is all you will really need to do (and that's really just for you, since a lot of people don't like the scent of strong vinegar). It won't harm your snake. It also works nicely as a deodorizer when you use it to clean the cage later (while you have a snake living in there, and can't just rinse and re-rinse the cage a million times).

Good luck to you. I hope you see this, and I hope it helps.

~Rebecca
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0.1 Dumeril's Boa '04 (Courtney)
1.2 Ball Pythons



0.2 American Pit Bull Terriers (40lb darling lap dogs:Brandy&Mara)

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