Ten Health Advice for Pet Snakes

When you first start learning how to care for a pet snake, you discover that there is a lot to learn, but you quickly realize that most of it just makes sense when it comes to properly caring for your pet snake’s health and wellbeing.

The most important things to be aware of are what a snake eats, how much and how often it eats it, and what kind of snake cage and environmental conditions it needs. In order to keep your pet snake healthy and content while under your care, you should also make sure that the living conditions are clean and hygienic and suitable for its requirements.

In here I list ten of the basic pet snake health tips that you need to know:

1. Select a Healthy Snake to Adopt

Choose a snake that is alert, well-muscled, has clear eyes, no cuts, no mites, and no ticks or mites. When you handle the snake, it should exhibit curiosity and grab you firmly but gently.

When the snakes are fed, you should be there to watch them and ensure that the snakes you are choosing from are all getting a good meal.

It is better to purchase a captive-bred snake than a wild snake if you want to keep it as a pet. When captured and transported to the pet supplier, snakes born in the wild are typically under a lot of stress. A significant parasite load is also most likely to exist in wild snakes.

2. Get the Right Size Cage for Your Breed of Snake

Normally, your enclosure should be about two thirds the length of its body. The cage needs to be a minimum of four feet long if your snake is six feet long.

Even though the enclosure can be made to be longer than the snake, the snake will be more at ease in a cage that is shorter than the snake’s length.

As your snake grows, don’t forget to upgrade the enclosure because it needs to get bigger relative to the snake’s body length.

3. Keep the Snake Enclosure Humid

Because snakes are sensitive to changes in humidity and temperature, you should always make sure their enclosure is maintained at the appropriate temperature. For information on the ideal environments for your particular breed of snake, consult a reputable snake pet book.

4. Keep the Feeding of Your Snake Simple Safe and Hygienic

Make sure to choose a pet snake when you go to buy one that will happily eat thawed rodents (which you purchase frozen from the pet store) and is not overly picky about what they eat.

Do not entertain your friends by feeding your snake live rodents, even small mice, as this can harm the snake.

The dead animal being used as food shouldn’t be wider than the snake’s head. You can keep the pre-killed, frozen mice in your freezer because snakes don’t eat very frequently.

5. Learn how Much and how Often to Feed Your Snake

Get professional guidance on the best feeding schedule, type, and quantity of food for your pet snake.

Snakes will typically regurgitate the meal after a day or two if they have been overfed. However, they will eat almost anything that is fed to them.

6. Make Sure Your Snake Cage is Secure

The snake cage, terrarium, enclosure etc should always be well planned and ventilated, but also thoroughly secured to prevent the snake escaping

Breeds like corn snakes can be excellent escape artists, and if you’re not careful, you could quickly lose your pet snake.

To test the strength of the cage or doorways, they will even use their noses to push against the lid of the enclosure.

7. Fresh water should always be available.

Snakes soak themselves in water and urinate there, especially before shedding.

If there are any indications of pollution in the water, you must make sure to check it frequently and replace it with clean water.

Purchase a sturdy dish or container so that it won’t topple over when the snake slithers inside of it.

Multiple water dishes in the snake cage are a good idea because they aid in maintaining the snake’s ideal humidity level.

8. Make Secure Hideouts for Your Snake.

Both the warm and cool ends of the enclosure should have hiding spots.

If placed on a substrate that allows the snakes to burrow underneath them, bark fragments with hollow areas or curved shapes that create “cave-like” structures make good snake hiding places.

A wide variety of wooden structures and snake caves are available from pet stores and online at Amazon. These are typically also simple to keep clean and sanitary.

As a snake can climb and coil on smooth tree branches, add some of those as well. These are also available online.

9. Provide a range of temperatures in the cage

Your snake needs to be able to find a variety of places that are both warm and cool, depending on what it may need at various times of the day.

You must make sure you provide a range of temperatures inside the enclosure for it to choose from because it can’t move around a garden to find its ideal temperature at any given time, such as a rock to sleep on top of for warm sunlight or underneath for coolness.

The temperature should gradually increase as it moves from one end of the enclosure to the other, with one end of the enclosure being cooler.

You can purchase a full-spectrum incandescent light to hang above the enclosure, which can provide some heat and function as a sunny basking area.

10. Use appropriate bedding for the snake cage

The ideal substrate is newspaper. It is extremely affordable and is quickly replaced when it gets soiled. You can also purchase astroturf online, which is a good substitute.

Before it wears out, artificial turf can be washed, dried, and used again several times. Before placing the dirty turf back in the cage, thoroughly wash, rinse it with clean water, and dry it. Then soak it in one gallon of water to which two tablespoons of bleach have been added.

As long as you learn how to care for a pet snake, meet all of its basic needs, and refrain from overfeeding it, snakes will live long and healthy lives.