Tattooing for Identification

Here some time ago I seen someone make mention of tattooing initials or numbers on their snakes belly scales as a form of permanent ID. Now I cannot find anything about it and searching for ANYTHING related to snakes and tattoos just gives me people will snake tattoos on their bodies, and anything with snakes and identification brings up a thousand sites with people wanting someone to ID the species of snake they found.

I personally thought that with the way snakes shed, the tattoo would fade away, but someone said they had their snake tattooed years previous and the tattoo was still strong.

I am mostly interested in it for ID purposes in case of theft, specially in snakes that are solid colors where markings would not be easily photographed for record keeping. Also possibly to mark hets as my collection grows.

Personally I would go with microchipping over tattooing for your purpose.

I did consider micro-chipping as well, but it seems like the scanners are rather expensive and I am not sure I could afford the investment for the size collection I am going to have. It would provide proof of ownership, but that would be the extent of it's usefulness without owning a scanner to read the chips.

Unfortunately, to properly tattoo any animal they need to be sedated.

Scale clipping is sometimes done for research purposes, but I'm not sure how feasible it would be for captive reptiles. Micro chipping seems to be the wag to go.

I don't know anything about tattooing snakes (and honestly, anesthesia for your entire collection sounds like it will get pricey...), but if you want to save money on chipping, try calling around and finding out what vets in your area will charge if you bring in the micro chips yourself. You can order the microchip kits off ebay (comes with the syringe and everything) and some vets will put it in for free or for a small fee.

When I chipped my dog it was about $40 here in Canada with the chip being about $12.

I would just get the vet to do it and skip cheaping out. After all I assume you would be doing higher dollar morphs vs your average pastel or spider.