Housing Retics together?

[Skiploder]

I am planning on making a enclosure that will go under my bed and will be 6 feet long, 4 feet wide and 2 feet high. I was wanting to know if I could put two retics together and they would permanently live together, perferbly male and female because I want to breed.

Well, well Mr. OP, you have inadvertantly opened up quite the can of worms.

I don't keep retics, never have, never will. However, I have kept and do keep more species than I can easily count and have this bit of advice for you:

There are many species of snake that do just fine when properly cohabitated. More importantly, There are many species of snake that will not breed in captivity unless cohabitated year round. That's a fact, and any chonie smear stain that wishes to debate that FACT with me can meet in the woodshed where I will deal with your misconceptions and lack of pertinent experience in a more direct manner.

So my advice is pretty darn simple - any blithering fool who baldly states that NO species of snake can EVER be housed together is a tool that you should not heed a shred of advice from. Sadly, some people feel that their experience with a couple of species qualifies them to make stupid and false statements about ALL snakes.

Take your advice from someone who has been into retics a long time, and did not absorb their knowledge from a forum caresheet cobbled together by some PS3 playing Generation Z lay about who stayed up all night in his parents basement penning his brilliant manifesto on snake husbandry.

Yes Forum Sheeple, the principles against cohabitating snakes you repeatedly and predictably spout all have the roots in the culture of BS that seems to have it's roots in self ordained experts deciding that their two or three years of experience with a narrow band of species should apply to everything snakey. It concerns me that some of you think that two long term captive snakes, that have been properly quarantined and housed can all of a sudden get sick. Again, the knowledge you all are absorbing from the intrawebs has brainwashed you into believing things can't be done that can and that things magically happen that really don't.

There are people who have been into retics a long time and who can give you real advice born from real experience. Not ersatz advice born from reading a laughable caresheet written by someone who researched the data from Google searches.

Here's something for you all to chew on while you think about how you are going to try to back hand me for this post:

5 years ago there was a person (who I will not name) who used to post on this and many other forums. This dude was a moderator on a couple of other sites and penned quite a few care sheets. From the safety of anonymity of his musty bedroom he used to dispense God knows how many advice posts which many in the online community eagerly took as gospel. Heck, I still see some forum zombies unknowingly quote his garbage from time to time these days.

Long story short - his advice was specious at best, but he wrote his posts in such a direct and aggressive manner that people ASSumed that he knew his left nut from his right.

I was at an expo where I was doing a speaking thing on dispholidines. After the presentation he came up and introduced himself to me.

I can count all of the times in my life when I have actually been tongue tied and this was one of them. The internet "expert" standing in front of me was a gangly weed of a teenager, probably no more than 18 years old, who I would not have trusted to pick dog crap up off of my lawn. The guy who had moderated another forum and "spoke" with so much "authority" and dispensed so much "advice" was nothing more than some nerdy, World of Warcraft playing social outcast who had not only carved an alternate fantasy world in online adventure games, but apparently on the snake forums themselves.

I don't know what happened to him, but like most people in this hobby, he quietly faded away one day. Maybe he met a girl who liked video games, fast food and Dungeons and Dragons as much as him, maybe his parents forced him to go away to community college, or maybe he realized that being an online snake expert wasn't as rewarding as he once thought. His involvement in the hobby lives today, as I still see many of the false advice he so readily dished out vomited up all over the forums.

I could go on and tell you stories of people who I sold cribos to who in a couple of months, despite admitting to me that they had never worked with drys before, were spouting off cribo care tips all over the web (and in one case one wrote a damn caresheet)..........but you all get the picture - right?

Remember, many of the self proclaimed experts on the forums are experts only in using the Google search function.