I agree with Mark AND Kingboa. Sorry Jorge!! But, I do believe in your theory of non-conditioning and the only way you can do that IMO is to handle your snake often, and not just during feeding. All to often with larger collections, "Play time" handling of your animals is not always feasible like back in the day when you had one snake and played with it while watching Saturday morning cartoons, and pretty much every day possible besides right after feeding. Also, my snakes were WC and were fed live mice or lizards. No f/t back then. These wild animals were also not used to food dropping in from above like many of the cb animals are, and it actually took them awhile to realize prey was available. They were actually more conditioned of a natural environment. I dont remember having any "food aggressive" bites and once the snakes were calm and tamed, they were pretty much reliable from a non-biting standpoint. Many have cb animals now that are tame, but will still give more food aggressive bites or chews out of the blue and are IMO more unreliable from an overall biting standpoint than tamed WC individuals. Just my unscientific observations mind you, but I still think are valid. Because of our current feeding practices, there are only two or three snakes in my collection I am confident of just reaching into the cage and picking up without first notifying them its not food by touching with a hook. The older ones in my care longer usually realize its not food time once touched with the hook first and then can be safely picked up. So, I have to un-condition them to expecting food everytime the cage is opened with hook touching first.

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