Quote Originally Posted by tsy72001 View Post
With this said, the sweet snake that we have, 1st one, is not aggressive at all, except in her feeding box. She bite my son and drew blood. The has never struck from her cage or another time.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
That is actually my point this is a rat scented area with the scent of rat snakes most snakes will strike. Only one of my 11 will not strike under these circumstances. This is not cage aggression just normal healthy feeding response. I wonder if you understand the nature of your own question. The idea is that feeding inside the enclosure will make the snake aggressive inside the cage during non feeding time. the answer is no.

let me try a different method. Snakes have a lower type of response than many other pets, a dog has instinctive responses and cognitive responses and a range of mixed between the two partial instinct with some amount of intellectual control at the same time. Snakes do not. They are either in cognitive response (I like exploration mode) or instinct mode. When in instinct there is nobody home they are running on genetic imperatives. A snake triggered to feeding response by say a smell (why most will pre scent a room to trigger feeding mode) will react as a instinctive killing machine. get in the way and have a 'Stupid Feeding Accident' not the snakes fault, yours. Ever notice a coiled snake even the most shy one can be moved and manipulated in ways they would never tolerate just sitting there? Instinct, no thought at all. When out just hanging with you they may go into instinct mode (defence balling up) but often they are interested in their surroundings tongue flicking and curiously nosing about in a relaxed calm manor (exploration mode). Feeding in the cage will not mean that when you go to change the water (no feeding trigger present) the snake will instantly drop into feeding mode and strike. I have a snake that is bold and aggressive she has struck me 3 times with no reason I can discern. The other 10 I have had 2 strikes from, one time, I accidentally left a zip lock bag that had the the previous days rat in it on the enclosure top. I saw him out and though you ate yesterday you should be sleeping it off you must have pee'd not he was in full on feeding mode. I failed to read the signs correctly and just popped my hand in and got a quick nip for my efforts. The second was straight up abject terror on the snakes part. I rehab rescues and we had got one from a far off spca that had no idea of how to deal with it so the placed it in a room full of barking dogs for a week I got a snake that had come from a car after a 3 hour drive. The snake had 8 or 10 ticks (dog ticks) on it was seriously stressed in a very tight ball. I broke a cardinal rule. I decided to deal with the ticks straight off rather than pop him into quarantine and give him a day to settle before assessing the issues. I dove in and started un curling him and using tick tweezers. I got bit. My fault.

A docile snake will not become an aggressive snake in the cage just because it has been conditioned to be fed in the cage. If that were the case and conditioning could be trained to that degree to over come instinct you could condition a snake to say roll over or other tricks. The case is they can only in the most base way be controlled by manipulation of instinctive drivers. For example feeding a snake dead food by 'tricking it' with artificial body heat and motion. Just tossing in a cold rat is unlikely to get a feeding response they simply will not see it as food.

I simply cannot accept that feeding in the enclosure will mean a snake void of any prey scent or other prey like stimulus will strike when it never did before.