Poop Problem

[jfmoore]

Hi,

It's not whether your water is hard or soft or neutral. It's not that they lead a sedentary lifestyle, whether in your home or in Sumatra . You've got a humidity problem. Or rather, a lack of humidity problem.

No, it is not normal for these snakes to go for four or more months blocked by large urate masses with ever-increasing fecal matter building up behind the urates. Well, it is all too often normal in captivity, but that is due to our failure to provide conditions that come anywhere close to mimicking what these pythons experience in their native habitats.

According to your earlier posts, you've got this animal in a screen-topped aquarium with overhead lighting/heating. It's darn-near impossible to provide decent humidity for blood pythons in a set up like this, especially during cold weather when the air in our own homes is desert-like in moisture content.

Under ideal conditions, your young blood python would be passing urates and defecating as often as every 2 or 3 weeks if you were feeding it regularly. Want proof of this? Go get an appropriately-sized plastic sweater box with lid to use as a cage; burn or poke just a couple of small holes on two sides of the box; lay down some newspapers inside; put in a large water bowl; heat the cage properly; insert snake; make sure at least part of the substrate is damp; feed snake. Not only will it eliminate every few weeks, its sheds will come off easily and in one piece.

But most of us don't want to maintain our blood pythons like this, so we try to devise compromises which look nice or at least allow us to view the animals more easily than having them shut up in an opaque plastic box. Just understand: it's US, not them, who are responsible for their difficulties in passing waste normally or shedding without assistance.

P.S., I've made every mistake imaginable with blood pythons over the decades, so I know whereof I speak. At present, I've got animals that range in age from 4 months to 19 years old, all of which I bred and hatched. If it's any consolation, the "pooping problem" lessens with the adults, who somehow seem to tolerate less-than-ideal conditions better.

Good Luck!