I originally posted the following on the Rainbow Boa Forum. It was suggested that I bring it over here to get more people involved in this discussion.
...Okay I want to get some discussion going here. I think that 99% of captive snake health problems are caused by human errors. If you provide the right environment and food the snakes will do fine.
...When I first started keeping snakes back in the 60s we had a hard time keeping snakes alive more than a few years. I had a few that lasted more than 3 years but they were the exceptions. There were snakes in zoo collections that did better but we private keepers actually were pretty clueless about how to keep snakes healthy in captivity. There were zero books that had detailed information about keeping different species healthy. There were only a handful of books about snakes and all of them had fair to excellent information about identifying snakes and about their natural history but very little about the details of captive husbandry. Much of what we private keepers learned came from experimenting with caging, substrates, heating, lighting etc. People shared information and advances were made. During the 70s and into the 80s there were more and more good books that had detailed information about keeping the different species healthy in captivity. Many of us were able to captive breed some of the colubrids during the 60s but there were no private snake keepers who could reliably and repeatedly breed any of the boids. I actually had freshly captured colubrids breed and reproduce as early as 1964. I did not know anyone who successfully bred any boids except for a few cases of Bci that seemed to breed and reproduce sporadically. The people who were lucky enough to have a litter of Boa Constrictors could not count on repeating their success. Virtually all of the boids offered for sale were imported WC animals. The learning curve for breeding boids followed a decade or more behind the learning curve for keeping snakes healthy in captivity. The first books (in English) that had accurate boid captive breeding information came out in the late 1970s. Many species of boids were captive bred for the first time in the 80s and 90s. There are still a very few taxon that have not been captive bred. There is still plenty that we do not know about breeding even the commonly bred species. What I have learned over the last 40 years is how to keep snakes alive and healthy for a long time in captivity and how to breed them with limited suceess. Today we are at the point when many species can be kept alive and healthy for many years. When I do have snake health problem it is almost always related to something I have done trying to encourage them to reproduce. I make a mistake and the snake gets sick. BTW, to some extent the eastern Europeans were a decade or two ahead of the rest of the world in keeping and breeding snakes in captivity. They were keeping small reptiles in terraria in their homes in fairly large numbers back in the 1930s. Some of the earliest detailed reptile husbandry information was published in Polish and German. Opinions and comments?
Jeff Clark
