Ball Body Language?

[frankykeno]

Cam, I'd like to say first off that I think your child is great! What a wonderful and appropriate response to getting tagged. No blaming the snake or freaking out about the "evil snake" and all that. Just an "oh well, it's a snake and that's what snakes sometimes do" attitude. Very good! That's a future confident herper if I ever saw one.

Here's my take on handling and body language in ball pythons. BP's don't use a bite first ask questions later defense mode as much as other snakes, however, they can and will tag you sometimes without warning. It's just not that common once they mature out of the freaked out baby phase.

What we do with all our snakes (BP's, the boa's, the milksnake) is get them used to simple routines. Routine #1 is the "don't mind me I'm just cleaning up your poop" routine and doesn't entail us touching the snake or bothering it - we're just there as the housekeeping staff LOL. Routine #2 is the "let's share some time" one - for this one we might remove the hide if the snake is in it, we take a second to observe the snake's body position, rate of respiration and tongue flicking, we speak to the snake and gently stroke it well down it's body (avoiding the head), this allows the snake to become alert to us and this stroke is the signal that we are going to lift you out of your enclosure, almost all our snakes begin to know this touch and some will immediately start to go up our arms themselves. Routine #3 is feeding night - the snakes aren't handled, they are all primed to eat, most in full strike positions, we just slide out their tubs, introduce the live prey at the fullest point away from them and that's that, WHAMP! dinnertime!

We just basically repeat the three simple routines. The snakes are pretty smart about picking up what each means. If the tub opens and the rat is there....it's dinnertime....if the tub opens and somebody strokes my back, it's handling time....if the tub opens and somebody's not bothering me but is removing my poop, heck I've got a pretty good deal in life and can just go back to sleeping and dreaming of fat, juicy rats.

Learn to observe your snake in it's home. Watch it's body when it's hunting, watch it when it sleeps, when it's having a drink and out for a roam. You'll all soon learn to read it's subtle signals from that observation. When you do handle the snake, pay close attention to the tenseness of it's muscles, to it's grip on your arm, to the intenseness of it's whole being. It's very hard to describe but you can just look at a snake after awhile and know you are going to get nailed. Sometimes they surprise you but most of the time you know what's coming and can re-direct it or just choose to handle the snake at another time.