Are old towels or shirts good substrates?

I have a bunch of old towels and t-shirts, and I was thinking they might be good substrates for a baby cornsnake... No dust, no rough edges, plenty of folds to hide under. I could just trade them for others when they got dirty and wash them in the washing machine.

What do you guys think?

I SUPPOSE you could use them, but I would be extremely careful of the detergent you use to wash them with. They may get stained up quite a bit, and stink to high heaven...but go for it I suppose.

I've found that if you wash in hot water with some detergent it does the trick. Just be sure not to add dryer sheets when you dry them. We have a bunch of old towels that my dad found when his office moved (don't ask) and that's what we do. Haven't had any problems and we've had various reptiles on them. Just be sure to watch for poo and whatnot and get any soiled pieces out ASAP. I'm not sure I'd use it all the time but it works in a pinch.

~Katie

It's the old 'cloth nappies vs disposable diapers' debate....for snakes!

It sounds like the other substrate options are newspaper or paper towels, which seem like they would leave the snake exposed and unhappy, or aspen/organic cat litter, which are dusty...

I haven't seen other people's snake setups. Do you just pour aspen into the tank, and then dump it all out and pour in new stuff every week? Or do you use some sort of liner?

We found towels and flannel sheets worked fantastic for our boa cages - newspaper wasn't really absorbant enough and didn't want a wood chip when we were feeding in the cage. We found the towels or sheets easy to remove, drop the poop into the garbage and wash the cloth in hot water, regular detergent, no fabric softener.

We have not used them for colubrids like corns or milks because of the higher metabolic rate - while boas poo every couple weeks to a month, corns go a couple times a week or more - was just too much laundry for the number of snakes - but if you have only a few and don't mind the work, I believe that cloth works very well for bedding.

Only real issue we had was if one end of the material gets into the water dish it will wick all the water out and the cage will be soaked - same problem we find with paper towel bedding - which is what we use for baby corns. Our adult corns are on Carefresh or Beta chip - both work great - 1-2 inches of bedding in the cage, spot cleaned daily and replaced completely every week or two.

mary v.

why not use a paper towel? i think that they arent tooo expensive, and you dont have to wash them afterward

I use plain white paper towels and buy them by the bale. After trying other options this is what works best for me.