Another point is that many of the animals we now consider "domesticated" are so different from their wild ancestors that we aren't even totally sure what their wild ancestors even were. In general, they are adapted to provide specific resources (meat, wool, eggs, milk, etc) or perform specific tasks to the point of becoming at least as distinct from their wild relatives as a different subspecies or species. They have different behavior, often different dietary needs even. Dogs innately and instinctively watch and care about and respond to social cues from humans in a way that wolves don't, for example.

As far as domesticating snakes goes? In this case, we would be talking about breeding snakes to be companion animals for humans. Some possible desirable traits might be being less shy and defensive, always using the same spot as a toilet, and a tolerance for lower temperatures and humidity. After that, maybe a shift toward eating more frequent smaller meals (after all, if you want to train an animal, you have to be able to reward it for doing what you want), seeking out human interaction, or even behaviors that communicate the animal's needs or emotional state to humans, which their wild cousins don't need because they don't benefit from sharing that information.

Needless to say, that "wishlist" for domesticating a wild species includes a lot of things that take a *very* long time to happen - it's not just a handful of generations of selective breeding. It might not take that many generations to wind up with individuals who were distinctly more outgoing and curious, or better at things like puzzle feeders. But breeding for a python the same size as a ball that can digest and remain just as active in a 68 degree house, while seeking out human contact and with distinct signals for when it's hungry, thirsty, cold, hot, etc, might take awhile.

An interesting long-running experiment with foxes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ...icated_Red_Fox