I use newspaper. It's very easy and convenient when you have a lot of big snakes. It usually takes less than a minute per cage to roll up a solid waste or urine soaked section of papers (usually in a corner) and to simply lay out some more. It's quick, easy, and very sterile.



Over the last 28-29 years of keeping snakes and other reptiles I have used probably every substrate known to herper-man for a lengthy period. I first used aquarium rock or sand (depending on the species) for a few years. At first it seems to work alright. You can scoop out messes with considerable ease and only a little sand or rock sticks to it. But then over time the urine, which simply filters down through this non-absorbant bedding, begins to build up and really stink. I went through many additional months trying to make it work, bleaching out the rock once a month, trying to bake out the smell, nothing was long term or sensible.



So I ditched the colorful rock and bland sand and went to towels and blankets. I had to wash the towels and blankets every week or two but it wasn't much of a hardship until I began to compile many more snakes. Before long the task of having to wash and dry the cloths was just overwhelming.



So I ditched the towels and tried astro turf. I had seen it in pet shops and thought it looked nice and decided I would give it a try. So I bought a big spool of astro and fitted all my cages with it. This was an instant disaster. The monitors pulled it up into a pile or shredded it with their claws, the urine from the pythons and boas and even smaller snakes had no where to go and stank badly. If the cage was wooden the wood soaked up urine and warped. If it was a glass aquarium I would have to frequently carry them outside and wash them out. It was just awful. Not to mention the fact that every cage being GREEN actually looked terrible. With one or two cages in a pet shop it looks okay,. but with 30 or 40 cages all green it's ugly. So I decided after maybe half a year or so that I needed something convenient and simple, but absorbant, and also good looking....



So I decided to give carpet a whirl. It looked great, I had different colors to choose from, it absorbed a lot of the urine,... but it too had serious flaws. It was a b**ch to clean. The calcium deposit in the urine would usually stick to it like crazy glue and when I scraped it or pulled on it the carpet fibers would pull out. Plus, the carpet pieces were much more thick, heavy and stiff and were even more troublesome to take out to clean. And they took days to dry. So it was back to the drawing board.



I don't really remember what I tried next, but during a 3 or 4 year period I tried many different things. I tried cat litter for a while. Real ugly stuff, but it absorbed real well. The downside was that it got stuck on the snake's food and in the snake's mouths and it just made a mess all over the room. At some point I also tried potting soil. This was a disaster too.



Then I got great advice and tried newspaper. I tried it and it worked really well. Albeit ugly, the stuff worked great. But it cost quarters and it became too expensive. I was too young to have the insight to contact a newspaper company to ask for a deal on surplus tonnage. I was dependant on neighbors and newspaper racks and hoping I wasn't caught taking 10 newspapers when I paid for one, lol. So I tossed the best substrate to the side. This was about 1986 or so.



For the next few years I bought and used pine shavings. It was very messy, but it absorbed well and usually compacted pretty fine and was pretty easy to work with. But during that time I got a snake in with mites. Here my mitemare begins! Because by this time I was building my own wooden cages and there was an abundance of wood shavings, nothing worked to rid the colony of mites. It was an awful awful thing. I would use some serious toxic stuff and seem to win, killing the adults in view and on the snakes, but in just days the mites would be back in the thousands. It was very frustrating. The worst part of all was that I didn't know then that the shavings were making it easy for them to thrive. In my mind the mites lived and reproduced on the snakes. So when I repeatedly eliminated them on the snakes I thought I'd erradicated them. Before long, amidst this awful mitemare, I decided to get out of the reptile business forever. (I was breeding from the early 80's). So I sold everything I had.



A few years ago, when I decided to get back into this business I thought I would do it correctly and perfectly this time around. To obtain my animals from a few select breeders and to establish clean and closed colonies mite-free from the beginning. I couldn't have been more wrong thinking that snakes from a bigger breeder would be somehow better or healthier, but I have been very fortunate with any parasites. Not a single mite. And part of this is undoubtedly due to using newspapers as a substrate. (to get back to the subject at hand). To use newspapers in conjuction with caging that offers little or no nooks and crannies for the mites to lay their eggs, you offer little chance for mites to get a foothold should a stray mite or two hitch a ride into your colony.



I don't advise that you cover your heating pads with anything but most especially something as flamable as newspaper.



>>How many in here use Newspaper? And is it ok to put news paper over one of those eat pads.

>>

>>Or what is that white shaving stuff? and is that safe to still feed your snake in. And when they deficate in the cage, do all you have to do is remove that part and add more shaving things or do you have to take it all out.

>>

>>I currently use carpet but my burm have been going to the bath room like once a week now, and as you all know its a smelly thing. It drives me crazy she pees and then I clean her and then a couple hours later poops. She has done this to me to many times. I will soon have a pic up of her, she is 7ft now and eating a rabbit every 4-5 days, I swear she is going to eat me out of the house, everytime I walk in the room she comes up as if to say can I eat now, Im like I just fed you. oh well I am done.

>>

>>Thank you

>>Jeff
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"If I had 365 enemies it would only take a year out of my life to settle all scores." Mia Miselfani

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