Oh, since we’re on the subject and you said people read this forum for education, I want to make one follow-up comment in case anybody does actually read this random thread about feeding a kingsnake someday and the multi-animal household situation happens to be relevant to them too:
It may seem weird that the cats apparently ignore the cages in the bedroom but I wouldn’t trust them with one in the kitchen. I think of it the same way as training a horse or a dog. Just because a horse may obey the rider in the arena doesn’t guarantee they’ll be the same outside of it, because there’s new things around that they may decide is more interesting than following the rules. Likewise, just because my cats do fine with snake cages in the bedroom doesn’t mean they’d be equally fine with a cage suddenly being put in the kitchen. That’s something completely different, a change to the routine that they’d want to investigate. If I did that, I’d expect to start over from scratch with getting them to ignore the kitchen cage. (I even set up the new snakes' empty permanent cages in the bedroom long before quarantine is up, to get that environmental change out of the way in advance by desensitizing them to the additions.)
So anyone with multiple other pets should keep that in mind! I think that’s pretty straightforward animal behavior that owners already understand, but it’s worth a reminder just in case.
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