Reptile & Amphibian Forums

i was thinking of putting mirrors as the sides of my enclosure, a rainforest poster behing plexi glass as the back and some locking framed plexiglass dorrs for the front of my boa enclosure.

I chose mirrors for the sides to kind of make the enclosure look bigger instead of putting plexiglass windows there too.

would a snake have aggression problems with seeing itself reflected like birds for instance?

First off use plywood for the back, plexi will warp, discolor, scratch etc and is not the best option long term.

As far as the mirrors go, I can't tell you for sure as I've never used them. I don't think the snake will be fooled about the size of the enclosure. After all he will be spending 90% of his life in the cage and will probably have a good idea exactly how big it is.

It probably won't provide a benefit to the snake, so why do it. He has to live in it so focus on making it usable for him. All the extras and such are for humans, not the animals.

I saw a fellow at a herp show selling cages with details like you mention. His mirrored cage was definitely neat looking, and he had his logo on the mirrors.

A very interesting thing he did on other cages was to have a plastic sign made, and he cut it and fixed it to the back and sides. He had signs saying things like "Snakes rule" and a cage had B&W checkerboard pattern and even a sign with formula-1 race cars, all professionally done. In other cages he had posters cut to fit and put those behind thin acrylic sheet plastic like you mentioned.

No real value to the snakes, but great stuff for people to admire. The plastic sign material cleans easily, so that is a benefit I suppose. The cage bottoms had vinyl flooring, and he used silicon to seal the seams. The outside of the cages were covered in black speaker-cabinet material. The cages were made out of MDF and plywood for the bottom.
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Mark

thank you for telling me, i thought maybe i was the only person who thought any of that was a good idea. what you said about the outside being like speakers is a good idea the mdf would be cheaper and my boyfriend makespeaker boxes as a sort of hobby so that would fit in pretty good.