Quote Originally Posted by Kaorte View Post
I, as well as many other keepers, feed all my snakes in their home enclosure. They aren't stupid. If you don't smell like a mouse and you don't look like a mouse then they shouldn't look at your hand and see food. You only feed once a week. If you go in the cage for any other reason other than feeding then no association between opening the cage and feeding should be made unless you are under feeding your snake and it it constantly hungry.
if you do nothing but just open the cage to feed your snake and clean the cage, they can get "trained" into having a feeding response when the cage is opened, it doesn't have to be underfed, its just all they know. breaking the auto-feed response once its there can be hard tho. Friends of mine have a few snakes that just have an auto-feed response, it almost look like he snake is chasing them until it realizes "oh, wait, thats not food", those snakes arn't handled at all unless I come over lol. watching some BHB videos it looks like they have some snakes that are like that also but, I don't know for sure.

but like Kaorte said, most of us feed in their enclosure and have no problems.