Quote Originally Posted by tizzle89 View Post
its not my goal to prove ya all wrong.. its just what happens everyone on here seems to take un needed precautions. look at it like this guys. the snake is in the wild right.. and oh no theres no humans to make sure his natural prey doesnt eat him? lol i have left live food in his cage for a year now sometimes 2 to 3 live mice.. he eats them all 1 by 1 with no damage to him.
Bad analogy. In the wild, the mouse/rat can run off and so can the snake. When you put both in a rubber maid container, they're both trapped and can do unpredictable things.

It's fine if you want to do things your way. I've done that too. The way we keep our snakes is to follow proven methods so that we can keep from having a gigantic vet bill later. Yes, we baby our snakes because well, they're our pets and they're completely dependent on our care. If it happens that we have to spend $1,000 on the vet, we are going to have to cough up the money. Some people won't. Lots of members on this forum will, though.

On the warped rubber maid lid... Do you use a ceramic heat lamp or some other heat source on top of the container? If so, this might be too hot for the heat tolerance of rubber maids being that you're starting off from a very low room temperature setting and have to produce so much heat on the lid to raise ambient temps inside the container. If you're using heat mats under the container, the lid shouldn't warp. It might just be that you need some kind of a bungee cord or something to wrap around your rubber maid. I know that I have to put a hook on the lids when I used a Sterilite container as the lid is made of flimsy material.

You might want to look into Really Useful Box (RUB) which has a more robust lid than rubber maids or sterilites or look into a wooden vivarium.

Just a suggestion.