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[Spoons]

I just tried to join Advanced Herpetological Husbandry and right from the get-go I see a huge red flag.

In the questions you have to answer, they state, “In this group we do not believe in minimalistic housing.”

What’s with everyone trying to make everything so black and white, right and wrong? Don’t misunderstand me - there ARE distinctly bad and good husbandry practices. But there’s also a lot of grey area in between that depends on the species, the keeper, and the individual animal. I just hate it when people are so hell bent on one particular ideology they can’t open their darn eyes to recognize that there might be a place for more than one way of doing things.

I have naturalistic-ish setups right now, so I’m obviously not against them. But it still grinds my gears because I’ve done the minimalistic route in the past and quite frankly, the only one who noticed the difference was me. The snakes behaved exactly the same and thrived regardless - talking about BPs and boas here. Other species might differ. But I want to do naturalistic right now because I have a small number of animals and it’s rewarding to me to set up the enclosures and display them in my house etc. If I had more animals, I might go back to minimalistic, because it’s easier to maintain.

It’s so frustrating.


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I am in this group! As well as the Not Just A Pet Rock group. I love both groups. I think they probably just focus on the naturalistic enrichment style of enclosures because almost EVERY other group has more of a focus on minimalistic enclosures. Obviously minimalistic can work and the snakes do fine in them, but almost every other group you will find for Ball Pythons has that theme, so I personally think it's a bit of fresh air to see one going the other direction. While I prefer large, naturalistic, bioactive, enrichment filled enclosures for my snakes, I also concede that the more minimalistic style works fine for people as well - that said, it's nice to have one place of all my BP social groups I am in that has naturalistic as a focus.

For the most part I stay far away from other BP Facebook groups. Nasty bunch of people.