Viscious Ball

[loonunit]

I disagree with a few things said/implied here.

1) ball pythons are not parrots or dogs... allowing a snake to bite you is not a reward or in any way going to motivate or encourage it to want to bite more. I have never encountered a snake that has bit (whether strike/coil or defensively strike/release) make the connection that biting in any way gets them something they want/stops behavior they don't want. Biting from a snake is an instinctive response... they do so because you smell like food, or they feel threatened by you. A bird might bite because it learns you make funny sounds when they do so, or because they learn it makes you leave them alone.... a ball python does not, or at least hasn't ever in my experience or the experience of my peers.

Have you ever had a latch and wrap ball python bite? Have you ever had a ball python bite you and NOT LET GO for 5 minutes, until you finally jammed a pencil between its jaws? Only to have it immediately look around for another way to grab hold of you? It's a very, very different experience from 99.9% of ball python bites. And I'm 99.9% certain that that particular snake felt very good about chomping on my warm, deliciously bloody mammal finger that day.

2) the OP says they feed in a seperate enclosure. I recommend reading the dozens of threads/debates on this topic, and consider the thousands of snakes that are fed properly in their enclosures that never become "cage aggressive".

Okay. If the OP said he feeds in a separate closure already, than that's what he does. And I read too quickly, so it's my mistake.

That said, I handle my ball pythons quite a lot. I have over a dozen of them. I have on more than one occasion been too lazy to remove a particular snake from its enclosure for several feedings in a row, only to have those same animals come shooting out in a very aggressive manner whenever I open my tanks/tubs, even on off-feeding days, while the rest of my collection ignored me in their usual manner. It's more pronounced during late summer. I have gotten a couple of hopeful feeding strike bites from my black pastel and het pied males as a result. They're not rocket scientists, these two, I admit it. But the feeding strikes stopped a week or two after I went back to separate enclosure feeding.

Most of the reason people feed in the same enclosure is simple convenience. It's a giant pain in the neck to do separate enclosure feedings when you have more than, oh, 10 snakes. Logistically it's impossible for large collections. But if you have one or two animals, and they are primarily pets and you handle them frequently, it's worth considering. Especially if they are already "nippy".