Quote Originally Posted by MelissaFlipski View Post
Jack, do you have any rufous beaked snakes? If not, do you plan to get a breeding pair? Just wondering. And can I responsibly own one with young children in the house? And thank YOU for your blog!

Joe, tell me more about your friends' rufous beaked snakes. Did you ever handle them? Etc., etc.
Mellisa,

I don't own any and while I had planned on getting a trio I have reset my goals and chose not to. I will probably buy a single one as soon as I get all my new caging built for my boas and my pythons.

I have even gotten rid of most of my House Snakes and placed them with Don Sonderberg at SMR. I am going 100% into education both as a writer and speaker with my Herp Activities. I have determined that if you want to breed snakes you have two choices.

Go small and highly specialized. It is very hard to work with a colony of 20 odd snakes of a given species and care for 20 other various species all with different needs. So if I wanted to stay breeding on any scale I would have to just work with my House Snakes.

The other options is go big and full time like Cathy Love, Bob Clark, etc. The people that produce a thousand or more animals a year and have it as full time employment can adapt to many species.

It just got to be too complicated and I want lots of variety in my collection. The only pairs I have now are a pair of Black Milks, a pair of Spotted Pythons, a pair of Skaapstekers and one pair of Cape House Snakes. I did the two Milks just so I always have one for shows. The Houses I do plan to breed the one pair. The others I would not have bought pairs if I got them today. I have just decided to keep the extras for now. In the future I may trade or sell the paired animals to do more variety.

Now um on your actual question, about kids and Rhamphiophis personally I don't have any problems with it at all. I would make sure the animal is secure and the children had 100% no access unsupervised to them but I would do the same with any snake even corns or balls.

I have handled many of these snakes and they are just docile creatures and no threat from a toxin stand point anyway. I would say a house cat poses more danger to a child then a Rhamphiophis.

Of course that is just my opinion and people must choose for themselves. Why not go to a big Herp show and handle a few to get a better understanding of them?