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Old 12-02-2019, 09:42 PM   #7
Rich Z
What we used to do, at least with the young snakes, was to first go through and clean the containers on all due to be fed that evening. Then on the second time through when the container was again opened, offer food. The snakes very quickly learned to recognize that the cleaning stage was not the dinner bell ringing which really helped reduce the premature feed response. But look out during stage 2! They had time to think about it, and were cocked and loaded waiting for the trigger pull!

With large numbers of animals, feeding in a separate container was just not feasible because of time constraints.

Personally, I never liked using substrates like aspen or pine shavings. Heard quite enough stories from people of one or more of their snakes ingesting a large mouthful of the substrate, and some wound up getting intestinal impactions and expiring from that mishap. So using some sort of clean platform surface to reduce the possibility of that sort of thing taking place would be well worth the effort, if the number of animals you are dealing with is relatively modest.

YMMV, of course.