So the boa I've been talking about was held for hours today, she didn't hiss or strike, not even while she was being taken out of her tank. After the questions I've asked, I thought some of you might like to know she's doig better. Here's what changed. (If you don't read it all, I'll understand. I have a problem with keeping posts short.)
1. Her tank was cleaned. By the looks of it we were the first ones to clean it in a very long time. I had to take a spatula to scrape all the sand and what not out of the bottom of the tank.
2. Her subtrate was changed. My girlfriend hated the sand subtrate (it's technically her snake, Christmas present) and my friend got a brick of Eco-Earth for his Chinese water dragon and that little brick made plenty enough to fill the two tanks. She seems to like that a lot better.
3. Put in some terrarium moss to bring up the humidity. It's ate moderate right now (between desert and tropical) any suggestions on where I should put it at?
4. A water bowl was put in. We did this the first day we got her, and verbally abused the previous owners quite a bit for not having one in there, and she was having problems shedding before, go figure.
5. Fed her prekills, she didn't take right away, but after a while she ate them. The previous owner was one of those "What's the point of having a snake if you can't watch them kill" sort of people.
6. Used a heat lamp to bring up ambient temperature. The previous owner just had a tiny subtrate heater that covered about 1/6 of the tank. I understand that you can get away with just subtrate heaters, but it doesn't hurt to keep the ambient temperature at.
When I went to take her out to clean the tank and put the new subtrate in, she bit me once while I was taking her out and one or two more times while I was holding her. Then I went to work and when I got home my girlfriend was holding her and she let me hold her too. The only things that had changed between those two periods were the prekills, clean tank, new subtrate, and moss.
P.S. Does anyone have any suggestions on building/buying tanks? She came with a 20H and she's just barely less than twice the size of it now. Since I don't have a large collection of snakes, I would prefer to lean more towards aesthetics, but some sort of middle ground would be good, I mostly just want to be able to see into the tank. Building would probably be the best solution, since I'm not exactly a millionare.
Thanks for reading.
