#snakeblogging

[songofsaraneth]

Kazul came out for a wander and tried to climb up the shelf but instead knocked over a jar and managed to turn on my printer. when i put her back in the tank she Sulked.

[lill-klippen]

[bigbadfrostwolf]

Got to spend a little time bonding with the new baby

[watchfulgoth]

pls enjoy these pics of dante and celestine bonding!!

[dailydragons]

Since people were already interested, this is her!! These are the photos from the breeder, not ones I’ve taken--I’m on a 12 day work trip so am waiting to have her shipped until after I return. She is a Guyanese BCC born August 2nd of this year :) She’s already starting to show a lot of pink color on her sides & face, she’s gonna be beautiful!! 

I’ll post again once I have received her :) Until then, I now return to your regularly scheduled dragon art.

[foulserpent]

i wash my hands after handling the mouse and come back to see her like this

[songofsaraneth]

THE TANK! Four feet x 2 feet does not seem so big until suddenly it is in your living room and the box too. Now last summer in one of the reptile facebook groups I'm in, someone had posted a photo of their setup and asked if it might be too loud for the snake to be so close to their television. Someone else suggested she just get inside the tank and see for herself how loud it was. For some reason it did not occur to me to crawl into the first tank I bought Kazul (despite absolutely jumping into the box to see if I fit), so I was obsessed with trying it out once I got it. Also to just see what the room looks like from her point of view!! So anyway

It was pretty fun. And interesting to see my living room from that perspective!

I also let Kazul check it out before I assembled the whole deal and put in substrate to see what she thought of it all.

So, the reason I waited like 2 years to get a tank from this same guy (Boaphile) as her old tank despite the holdup was because he is the only one I know on the market making modular tanks. So I could attach this new segment right to the old one to make an 8ft long tank. You just unscrew some bolts holding a panel wall in place on each end, and then bolt the two halves together.

and then finally attached them! I wasn't sure if Kazul would go right in, or if she'd be cautious and take some time investigating all the new things. Sometimes she decides she doesn't trust new hides and it's 3 months before I see her ever go into them. But luckily I had an extra of her favorite hide box and was able to put that inside, and she went right in! It took until this week (so about 2 months) for her to hang out in the cork round but she did eventually try it out too :)

So that's that! I switched the bedding on her new side and I like it more, so now that I know she's fine with it, I'll change it out on the old side too. I do still want to get a fake rock background for the new side so they match but that's lower on the priority list right now.

Anyway here's some shots of her enjoying life :) I am still doing her little daily ritual of opening the door so she can stick her head out BUT alas she has learned You Can Just Leave, so, I have to keep a more stern eye on things or she tries to entangle herself with the plant or escape under the bookshelf.

[nagayna-snake]

23.02.2015 год.

8 месяцев.

Нагайна только-только приехала из зоомагазина в своё новый дом и немного шокирована вниманием к её персоне <3

[songofsaraneth]

ok im reblogging this because in fact. catching snakes with sugar IS something sometimes suggested. more often people suggest flour, but sugar will do in a pinch, because it's a visible particulate, although you can't leave it out as long because ants. but if your pet snake escapes its tank the way you catch it again is to lay lines of flour/sugar across all your doorways, and then see if it's moving between rooms at night/when you're not looking. Since it doesn't have legs it will always leave a mark/gap in the flour/sugar line, so you can tell which rooms it's been to. And then you can narrow down it's location with more and more powder lines or circles. you can even leave food in a tub overnight with a ring of powder around it to see if it will come get food while you try to catch it. so essentially yes you can catch a snake with sugar, providing you lost the snake yourself in the first place, and i thought this post was gonna be from one of the reptile blogs i follow before i scrolled down lmao

[lill-klippen]

bro if snake told me to be a good girl id just go insane

[is-the-owl-video-cute]

Snake blog says that some Youtubers are sometimes good sources for specific advice, but to take what they say with a grain of salt because of things like how they keep their animals. They have a whole post about not liking Snake Discovery's enclosures, especially for their legless lizards. Not exactly a glowing endorsement. For the NERD thing, Snakeblog said they practice good snake hook technique, but had no idea about any surgery. (1/2)

(2/2) Snake blog said they don't know what the surgery was because they haven't kept up, but explained that venom labs do minor stuff on their own like eyecap removal because many vets can't deal with venomous animals. They then specified that if a venomous snake does need something more invasive, though, then you should try to find a vet anyways, and doing an actual surgery is TERRIBLE at home.

Right, so here’s the thing about that:

It doesn’t matter if it isn’t a “glowing endorsement” if a blog considered to be knowledgeable about reptiles is sending people to animal abusers as a guideline for care, that is still a serious problem.

I have no doubt I could find some decent advice on owl diets or something from one of the many owl pet keepers on YouTube. I would still never send laymen to those channels as a “good reference” just because a broken clock is right twice a day.

If someone is searching the blog for good channels to watch for notes on care, do you think they’re going to take time to read through and find the disclaimers that the channel is also bad, or do you think they are going to just skim the post and click over to Snake Discovery and use them as a guideline for care?

If your only disclaimer is “their enclosures could be better” and not “hey these people are animal hoarders and abusers who neglected an alligator for seven years while using it as a prop for profit putting the well-being of both the animal and people at risk by dragging it around to public places on a leash with its snout not banded” it isn’t exactly a very good disclaimer either.

It’s exposing people to the content in a neutral light at worst which allows them to normalize what they are told by that content. The layman isn’t going to keep the enclosure issue in mind that long because they’re going to shift to seeing cool reptiles and charismatic people speaking to the camera in a confident tone that implies they actually know what they’re talking about.

That is how you get Snake Discovery and NERD more subscribers and fans in general. Not at all good for the future of reptile pet ownership.

Even if we take at face value that they didn’t know what the surgery entailed, wasn’t NERD the ableist and at least somewhat racist one? Or was that one of the other horrible snaketubers.

[watchfulgoth]

Because I haven't shown her off yet, meet my baby girl Hella(named for Hella Varal from f@tt)!! She's a Spider ball python, total babby. I love her v v much 😢💕💕💕

[songofsaraneth]

OP????? hello?? I am LOVING this thoughtful perspective on a video i took of my snake being particularly dumb one day. there was another user (I think @ayymanwtf​?) who commented in the tags on it a few days ago that animals probably do not interact with identical structures/geometry in the wild much, and so it makes sense to check and recheck different places (plus, green things are often things that bend/move out of your way, like grass or leaves), which is totally true. and i think your added perspective gives it an absolutely fascinating take on horror/the concept of the unexpected+unnatural. though I do think about the regularity of things like insect nests/burrows, so even at a very low level of active cognition (i mean this fondly for bugs) the animal kingdom does possess the ability to not only deal with but construct regularity. It’s hard to extrapolate what animals might have a concept of it vs not!

I also do want to assure you that between brains or beauty Kazul dumped all her stats into the latter, and I do not think she is smart enough for more than vague confusion let alone lasting trauma (and I say this with all the love and affection and frustration of a reptile mother who’s baby keeps sitting on top of her carefully thawed out dinner, being unable to locate it, getting sad it escaped and giving up, and then staring at me plaintively until i make the rodent magically appear again from beneath her).

also, if you’d like more unsettling feelings, I do have a video of her from this afternoon trying to swim through the side of her clear plastic bathtub bin ;) because it didn’t make sense that she couldn’t go through what she can see through, even though she does not make this mistake with her tank glass (maybe she has to learn it a second time for underwater). her back half of the body wasn’t even in the tub/water, just her nose, and i showed her the way up and over multiple times... but sometimes boas be like that. again, no lasting trauma, and it’ll be something that perplexes her again in another month or two before I pick her up from it.

also i turned on a light and got a photo of her nighttime roaming just for you 

I was reading your tags on the video of the snake being unable to get through the holes in the table and... I don't know how to say this but it's super comforting to know there's someone else as terrified of the mundane through the eyes of those for whom it isn't at all normal as I... Does that make sense?

Yes it absolutely makes sense. Like, i think videos of animals being confused or startled are funny and all but there are a handful of things in this world that would be deeply troubling for me to encounter if i wasn't already exposed to them pretty much since birth and raised to understand what they are and how they work.

I think glass is pretty upsetting, in theory. You can't see it, or you kind of can. It's like water but solid - or ice but not cold. It responds very audibly, even musically, when you touch it. It's very strong, until it's not, and either way it's very dangerous if you don't know what you're doing with it. Sometimes it reflects, sometimes it doesn't. Don't even get me started on mirrors, and then televisions? Actually i think TVs are less upsetting than mirrors because at least a TV you can turn off.

Even by itself, is a horror in the unfamiliar. Things which must have rules, but you don't know what they are yet. I am afraid of not knowing how to approach.

I have a natural preference for soft and busy imagery. Foliage and fields. Hard edges and straight lines make me uneasy as it is. There's something sinister about certain kinds of order.

My room is "a mess." I like it that way. I do not like clear walls and clear floors and neat lined-up rigid blank boxes. "Perfection" and "neatness," in a certain context, makes me feel exposed. It makes me feel like an intruder.

I have very strong but mixed feelings about straight lines that converge to a vanishing point.

I am honestly a little bit obsessed with identical things. Because so much of the time, that's not how nature works. Things have little differences. Leaves are widely varied, even on the same branch of the same tree. Rocks are unique. As are snowflakes, and animals. Even stars, specks of light in the sky, vary in size and intensity and color and texture, and are not even identical in their apparent movement.

Things could be more identical. But even on the atomic level, we know that all the atoms of an element are not identical, and even behave differently from other atoms of the same element because of this.

All these things can be strictly defined by mathematics, and yet even math when you look at it, in all its order and all its complexity, even this thing that people think of as the pinnacle of logical and order is full of variety, and math formulas are as beautiful and varied as leaves and flowers when you are shown how to identify them.

Humanity has something of a fascination with twins, i think, one that I am not immune to. Twins fascinate me. Because when are things ever so identical? For that to happen naturally is like a miracle.

When it happens unnaturally is when I feel afraid, whether or not that fear is justified. Because when are things ever so identical? Even our set of household spoons, mass-produced, are worn and tarnished in different ways from use. Even our set of mugs have different constellations of paint flecks where their glaze dripped just a bit which whoever or whatever painted them did not quite smooth it out. Many things in my home may be mass produced but I only own one of them, or where I own a copy of something, they show signs of wear that make them distinct.

There are not a lot of objects I come across in daily life which are meaningfully identical. Uniformity is the ultimate unfamiliar, and it is terrofying on a way I am not quick to forget.

I keep seeing this one post saying "I enjoy just existing in hotels," and I think that's great for op but I cannot agree. The unfamiliarity to everything which is there for your comfort - shower, lighting, furniture, AC unit - makes it feel deeply alien and puts me on my guard. The many, evenly spaced rooms all decorated the same. The hallways long enough almost to have a vanishing point at the end.

Hotels are nice in the context of the vacation that takes you to them, and as a place of people there is of course a feeling of being inhabited and the inevirable, comfortable marks of wear and warping that come with that. But I think if i didn't know what a hotel was, I would find it very unsettling. I find comfort in the soft carpet, imperfectly placed and often a little worn from use. The numbers on the doors that tell you where you are. But it wouldn't take much to distort a hotel into a place that felt very Wrong to me.

With all these feelings combined, I think the snake video could very easily feel like horror, from the perspective of the snake. Of course, I know from my own life that tables like that are very nonthreatening. We had similar tables at my high school, and I associate them with sharpie'd signatures on the sides and wads of gum underneath. I can feel their slightly grippy texture, the struggle to find something flat in my backpack since they can't be used as a wroting surface, the wobble under my feet as I stand on them singing showtunes with my friends. As with hotels, I have a lot of associations for them that masks the horror of the fact that they are deeply unnatural.

As i said in my tags, the snake doesn't seem all that distressed, but I admire its composure, because if I were faced with an obstacle like that - a thing that i didn't expect to be uniform, which I was coming to gradually realize was in fact perfectly uniform and, not only that, trapping me? It would no longer feel so harmless. I don't know what i would do, but I know I would not feel calm as i did it.

Because as any species on the planet other than a human? A green latticework is the last thing that should be uniform.

[dailydragons]

Hi guys! DailyDragons admin Jade here. I have a quick off-topic post and then it'll be back to dragon art! Are any of my followers reptile keepers? Specifically, I'm looking for people with experience keeping red-tailed boas (Boa constrictor constrictor). I have been preparing for the last two months and sometime after the next two weeks (depending on weather) my baby guyanese boa constrictor will be arriving!!! I've read every article on keeping them I can find/Vin Russo's book/dozens of forum posts, but I'd love to get in touch with anyone who has more experience with boas and is willing to answer questions from me should they come up. I don't have anything specific I Need To Know at the moment but I'm sure there's things I'll encounter on the way, and it'd be nice to have a few people to refer to instead of spending 3 hours on google comparing results (as I did while setting up the thermostat probe in my tank last night). And for everyone: how do you guys feel about me posting occasional photos of my snake here once she's arrived? She may not have wings, but I will be naming her after one of my favorite dragons :)

[foulserpent]

Wow!

[songofsaraneth]

couch time :)