Reasons for a VERY Grumpy Baby BP??

[angllady2]

Sounds like a perfectly normal baby Ball to me.

If your baby is still hungry, you have two options.

You can bump up prey size, either by offering a bigger single item, or two of the current size.

You can also choose to keep the current prey size and offer on a four or five day schedule instead.

Baby ball pythons are nervous by nature, you would be too if pretty much everything looks at you as a food source. They also eat a lot for their size, and if yours was being underfed, that's going to make it crabby as well. I don't know about you, but when I get hungry I get cranky too.

So for now, try just offering more food for a few weeks, and see if that doesn't go a long way towards settling it down.

When I rescued a sub adult female who had been badly underfed, she was so food aggressive it was scary! She'd track the movement of anything in the room with her, she snapped at everything and everyone who came near her tub. I was feeding her more than enough food, and she was still so convinced she was going to be starved again she would not stop snapping. I am convinced to this day she would have eaten until she burst herself if I had let her.

It took about 3 months of steady and slightly heavy feeding and eventually she calmed down and began to act like a normal ball. Now, she's so comfortable here she even went on a little feeding strike for me to let me know it was breeding season.

A full belly goes a long way towards making an underfed snake happy.

Gale

[Lisn123]

Sounds like a perfectly normal baby Ball to me.

If your baby is still hungry, you have two options.

You can bump up prey size, either by offering a bigger single item, or two of the current size.

You can also choose to keep the current prey size and offer on a four or five day schedule instead.

Baby ball pythons are nervous by nature, you would be too if pretty much everything looks at you as a food source. They also eat a lot for their size, and if yours was being underfed, that's going to make it crabby as well. I don't know about you, but when I get hungry I get cranky too.

So for now, try just offering more food for a few weeks, and see if that doesn't go a long way towards settling it down.

When I rescued a sub adult female who had been badly underfed, she was so food aggressive it was scary! She'd track the movement of anything in the room with her, she snapped at everything and everyone who came near her tub. I was feeding her more than enough food, and she was still so convinced she was going to be starved again she would not stop snapping. I am convinced to this day she would have eaten until she burst herself if I had let her.

It took about 3 months of steady and slightly heavy feeding and eventually she calmed down and began to act like a normal ball. Now, she's so comfortable here she even went on a little feeding strike for me to let me know it was breeding season.

A full belly goes a long way towards making an underfed snake happy.

Gale

Thank you Gale-
Its reassuring to hear your story.