DAILY CAMERA (Boulder, Colorado) 09 November 07 Looking for an alternative pet? Try a snake (Kyle McDaniel)
It’s about four to five feet long. Living in a 20-gallon tank containing a heat lamp and wood chips, it can be a pet for 15 years.
There’s no downside to having one, except maybe having to keep frozen mice or rats in your freezer with your food.
It’s a pet snake. And while the thought of a snake in the house might give some the creeps, some people still manage to take care and even enjoy them.
“It’s just the exotic nature of the pet -- I think that’s more appealing to some people than to others. It’s not cuddly or cozy like a dog, but its really low maintenance,” said Josh Wagner, a manager at Aqua Imports in Boulder.
A thawed mouse or rat once every two weeks will probably do the trick for a pet snake, Wagner said. Still, having a pet snake requires some significant maintenance, like cleaning the tank once a week or after the snake sheds its skin. A snake will shed its skin regularly, and an owner might have to rub the snake’s skin in order to remove the old skin completely.
Hygiene is also important with a pet snake. To prevent spreading diseases, owners need to wash their hands before and after handling the pet.
But the cost for a pet snake it relatively low. The initial set-up will probably cost between $150-500, Wagner said. But after the set-up, the cost of feeding it is less than $6 once every two weeks. Thawed and heated mice are preferred over live mice for a couple of reasons -- a snake’s behavior and safety can be affected by the type of food it eats.
“If you start feeding live (mice) that can start trigger aggression when they get older,” said Matt Lucas, a sales associate at Petco in Boulder. “Also, if you get a young snake that doesn’t know how to hunt quite yet with a live mouse and it grabs a mouse near the back of the leg, the mouse can wrap around and bite him in the head and actually kill him.”
For someone looking to buy a snake for the first time, both Wagner and Lucas suggest a ball python. Wagner said it is one of the easiest to handle, and Lucas suggested it because of the snake’s nature when it gets nervous or afraid.
“Their defense mechanism is to wrap all their muscles into their head. And instead of striking or hissing, they just wrap up into a little ball, hence their name,” Lucas said.
Looking for an alternative pet? Try a snake