Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I'm a college student so part of my tuition payment goes towards having access to all kinds of articles from academic journals and such from a lot of sources. While my line of study doesn't deal with herps or anything near it (I'm a history major) I have been using this access to read articles involving herps, and snakes in particular.

I came across an article regarding reptiles in Indiana written in 1944 and it was an interesting read, but the author spoke often of specimens he kept in a private collection as well as others who have experience keeping snakes in captivity, and not just keeping them but breeding as well.

I wonder, how long has the practice of keeping snakes in captivity been common? I understand tha people have probably had an interest in keeping wild caught for years upon years, but I wonder about the requirements for heat and such. What would have been the heating techniques at this time? I imagine a light could be used, etc, but what about monitoring temps? Maybe I'm thinking to in depth about this but I was just wondering if anyone might have any insight to this.

Thanks a lot!

About heating and lighting:

This was probably at a time when many snakes kept were native, so they probably didn't require the different temperatures that imported species require. I'm not sure when the increase in imports dates back to though so I couldnt be sure. Just a guess...
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0.1 ball python
0.1 corn snake
0.1 rosy boa
1.0 bearded dragon
1.0 leopard gecko
0.0.1 yellow ackie
1.0 greater earless lizard

0.1 quaker parrot
1.0 fischers lovebird

Keeping snakes goes back a couple of thousand years if not more. There are isolated populations of leopard rat snakes that are believed to be descended from snakes kept at temples in the Roman Empire.

Raymond Ditmars (first curator of reptiles at the Bronx Zoo) was among the first to make snake keeping respectable in the USA. Before him, most snake keepers were exotic dancers and circuses. Try to find RD's Thrills of a Naturalist's Quest. It's a good read about him starting out.

A guy out at the San Diego Zoo was routinely breeding pine snakes in the 1930s. See Henry Fitch's Reproduction in Lizards and Snakes, around 1970, Miscellaneous Papers of the Kansas University Museum of Zoology (I think).

Clifford Pope wrote Snakes Alive sometime back in the 1930s. It would be helpful. I don't recall much of anything available about snakes' thermal needs till some papers in the 1960s. Of course, back then air conditioning was a lot rarer than now. Snakes were a lot cheaper back then, too.

For what it's worth, I started messing around with snakes in the mid 1950s, and I don't recall knowing anything about heating requirements until Carl Kauffeld's Snakes: the Keeper and the Kept came out in the late 1960s. I'd bred a pair of bullsnakes two years in a row in the early 60s and did not have a clue to what I'd been doing right until the late 1970s.

Paul Hollander