Feel free to come home clean up the snake poop, urates, sheds and so forth from the 26 LOL. They aren't hard creatures to care for but once you pass 20 of them, it is a fair bit of daily work and record keeping.

You make a lot of interesting points and it's been interesting considering it all.

The point you made about cats though again illustrates my idea that there is only so much instinct that human driven conditioning can breed out of any creature. Cat's weren't bred to hunt mice for us, we simply took advantage of their instincts to do so. Even over all the time cats have been in human contact, even with no need to hunt to fill their bellies, quite a lot of cats will still hunt and do it with deadly efficiency. They will still bring half-dead prey home to their kittens in almost the exact same manner a cheetah female brings home a struggling gazelle calf to teach her cubs the rudiments of hunting, even though our pet cat's kittens will never need to know how to hunt to eat.

I think we humans in our usual manner believe we have a far greater affect on mother nature's creatures than we likely do.

With snakes, conditioning them to take f/t or p/k prey isn't turning them into scavengers in my opinion. A true scavenger eats cold dead things, things that may even be rotting (i.e. buzzards, etc.). Some hunting animals do scavenge to keep their bellies full if prey isn't found. Ball pythons for me aren't a true scavenger because their non-dead prey must show some signs of life for them to see them as prey. When it comes to f/t feeders, that's usually heat and we see a lot of owners here feeding f/t incorrectly and getting refusals. Once they make sure the f/t prey is warm enough, or wiggle it on tongs, the snake reacts. A true scavenger wouldn't care....food is food...warm and "alive"...or cold and dead.

Conditioning a behaviour for our convenience is one thing, having long term effect on evolution in a creature so basic and perfectly designed already, I'm not so sure of, that remains to be seen.