Quote Originally Posted by Annarose15 View Post
I'm with Mason on this one. I never would have reached my hand in my boa's cage on feeding day. You called the pieces "splinters", but were they actually imbedded in her flesh, or just stuck to saliva? A few swallowed pieces of aspen weren't going to do any damage. I'd be more worried about her grabbing a mouthful of paper towel, which WILL kill a snake if it gets ingested, since the whole sheet would get swallowed.
Yep, there is a photo floating around of a dead snake and a regurgitated paper towel. I believe it's on the Deviant Constrictors blog page.

I don't want to make light of any of this and I DO take every precaution to avoid ingested substrate. But snakes are fairly hardy animals and they scoop garbage up in their mouths in the wild all of the time. The digestive acids in their systems break down bone and I don't think coconut husk or some fine shredded other sub will be the end unless we are talking about a table spoon full of it. Impactions are rare but if they happen to you, "rare" sucks LOL!

A flat sheet of news print does not ball up like a paper towel so if you want, drop it down a day prior to feeding and go from there.

Any chance you can switch to frozen thawed?

Oddly enough, the ONLY time I've been bitten by my snake was when I tried to remove the news paper after he was 3/4's of the way done with his rat. Lesson learned.

Good luck.