Stop pushing!!

[The-ReptiRanch]

Good evening, friends! I am here to ask some questions of those of you who have successfully dissuaded your animals from excessive pushing. I imagine this will particularly pertain to retic keepers, but all advice is welcome!

I have a 5-6 year old Tanimbar Scrub Python who has really been banging up his face this year. After consulting some fellow scrub keepers, we decided this was partly hormonal - as it seems he and my Dumeril’s Boa both went through puberty this year and having a female housed above him during breeding season made him a little nuts.

Everyone was interested to see if the behavior would quiet after breeding season passed and, to some degree, it did. He had also hit a big growth spurt over the last year, so the consensus was that a larger enclosure was in order. I recently set him up in a 6x2.5x4 bioactive enclosure and for the first month, everything went great!

But last week, it started again. He is pushing obsessively and this neurotic behavior just has me at my wit’s end. He is seriously damaging his face and it has got to stop! I am in the process of re-adjusting his lighting and generally combing over his husbandry….as I think he wouldn’t be trying desperately to escape if his husbandry was on point. But he has much more space now, plenty of branches and hides…his humidity is around 70-80%, with a temperature gradient of 73-93. He is almost always basking during the day, rarely ever hides, and is very active at night. Aside from re-configuring his lighting, I also just bought a curtain for him (that I will install tomorrow)
so that he can have privacy and less stimulation from living room antics.

Other than that, I’m out of ideas. Have any of you keepers of obsessive pushers been able to curb this behavior? I’ll add some photos of his enclosure for reference.




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I definitely think the curtain should fix it. Anytime I have snakes push I just cover the cage or tub or whatever they are in and it stops. They dont quite understand the concept of transparent objects and they keep pushing around feeling for a way to get around it or through it. But another thing you can do is feed more often depending on your current feeding schedule. Snakes typically rest to digest food and will push to try and find food

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