Hi, I'm new to the forum, but not to ball pythons.

My wife's sister and her husband recently moved, and couldn't take their ball with them. We agreed to take care of the snake for them. I'm not sure of the snake's age, but it's probably ~1 yr, maybe less. Someone gave them a rather large aquarium (I'm guessing 75 gallons), so it's currently in that.

The snake NEVER leaves it's hollow rock thing except to eat (which it does well). Also, he has some sort of substrate which resembles sand. It's not sand, as it's softer, but it looks like large grained sand.

Would I be better off housing the snake in a tub of some sort? Also, does anybody think the substrate might be unsafe? In the past, I used indoor/outdoor carpet.

Also, he warned me that whenever people picked up the snake that "it always pees on them". I was under the impression that (like a bird) the white-ish portion of the waste was urine. Is there something else they could mistake for that, or is my brother-in-law just making it up?