How did you get started keeping Corns?

[Muggle]

I'm a happy relatively new snake owner . I've been fascinated with snakes for as long as I can remember. The first experience I ever had with snakes was on a preschool trip to the nature center. They were doing a presentation on local wild life, getting to hold a snake was very memorable ! My experiences after that were very limited. I've only seen them in the wild twice and until my niece got one five years ago I didn't know anyone who owned one. But I always did my school reports on them when asked to write about your favorite animal . I begged my dad to let me have one and it never worked, he let me have hamsters and birds but no snakes (don't know why since he always complained about there cages smelling and there noise, snakes would have been a better choice ) . Now that I'm on my own I can finally have what I always wanted! I have 2 of my own and would love more :crazy02: . There seems to be a running theme to these stories: parents not allowing snakes . One thing's for sure if any of my future children should ask for a pet I might not agree with (tarantula :sidestep: ) I'll at least take the time to learn with them and who knows . . .

 

[Bobo's Mama]

I have always loved animals in general and that didn't stop at snakes. I was always the only girl that wanted to hold the snake at those zoo things where you get to touch the animals. I almost caught a few snakes when I was a kid, but never did because i knew I wouldn't be able to keep them as pets, because my grandma who raised me was scared of them.

I got my amel Bobo almost as an act of defiance to my ex-husband. We were separated at the time and I knew there was nothing he could do to stop me. This is kind of the sad part... so I ran all over town looking at all the different petstores and their corns. Petco had corns for $60. A pet store in one mall had a snow for $70. A locally owned petstore had thier corns for $55, but all they ever had was candy canes for some reason. Finally I settled on the cheapest corn I could find. My amel was $40. I didn't know about breeders then. If I'd had more money (my ex had cut me off financially) I would have gotten the amel stripe that was in the same viv as Bobo, but it was $90.

Now I have 2 corns. I got my normal in October.

 

[sulu]

I have some lizards and one day my DH said scents I had them he should be able to get a snake. So i stratred checking on the internet what would be the best starter snake and keep reading on corns so took him to a reptile store and to let him choose a corn snake which was a creamcycle. Now I have 2 snakes .2 corns and 1 bairds rat snake. :crazy02:

 

[E. g. guttata]

My story is relatively simple. I was always fascinated by snakes. At the age of 7 I asked for my first snake. My parents and I talked about it a bit and decided to wait for a little while. Shortly (a year or two) after we moved into our current house, my dad started researching snakes. A few months after, he introduced me to corns. He had been looking on the SMR site. After several months of conversing back and forth with Don, I picked up my first pair of snakes (which I still have) at the last herp expo he did in KC. Been an addict ever since. It took me a few years before I added to my collection, and now I have 9, going on 1,000,000.

 

[ChristinaM]

I blame it all on one person.
I was going to a reptile expo and looking to carpool with someone to help cover gas costs for me. This "innocent" man who happened to be a major cornsnake breeder,took me up on my offer. After the expo, I took him home and he invited me in to see his setup.

Thanks to Simon Fung, LOL, that day I came home with my first cornsnake That was I believe in the fall of 2003. That day I also fell in love with one of his Brazilian Rainbow Boa's. Shortly after that, I came home with one. I never left his place empty handed... ever. Too bad he moved back to Hong Kong

I never really was overlly interested in snakes. I loved looking at the colours, etc. but never thought I would have one. I was a lizard person. Boy, was I in for a surprise.

 

[crazyforcorns]

Snakes have always fascinated me and scared the crap out of me at the same time. I am always willing to hold one with the handler close by. Seeing a snake in the wild, even a silly garder snake would give me the willy's, becuase they move so fast. More startled than anything.

It was actually my daughter's eagerness to research snakes and save up her money that won my approval. She's 10 and HATES reading. She discovered that corns are the best to start with..etc. I could ask her anything.

I found Annette's website and she had some red albino's available. My daughter squealed with excitment. We drove over 3 hours to pick out the little baby. We got her home, and she settled in immediately. We've had her for 2 weeks now and she has quite the personality. She's very curious to see who's watching her and is never in a hurry to hide away. I fell in love with her and then I decided to research corns..ALOT! She's not shy about eating either. She's had 2 very quick feedings already!

Now I have a snow hatchling. He's not as bold as my daughter's snake. In fact he's extremely shy. I know that will change once he's comfortable in his new home, because he was the funniest little guy when I picked him out.

I'm trying to figure out how getting one corn is like having only 1 beer, there's no such thing! How can these creatures be so addicting?

I am grabbed by the genetics. I used to raise Munchkins (dwarf cats)..and I was just getting to really understand genetics but then got out of breeding them. I have forgot most of it, but it's all coming back now. I just ordered Kathy Love's book and the morph guide.

My daughter really opened up a can of snakes!!

Kathy

 

[wild neonate]

personal experience

I got my first snake when i was 7 years old under the supervision of my father. The albino red rat was a Christmas gift...grew to be 5'6" on a diet of wild caught lizards over the course of about 7 years..over that time i acquired a few other snakes through field expeditions. I found a cali. king, another corn, and 2 water snakes which were all released later due to feeding difficulties (being a minor with no income or transportation to buy mice). After the albino cornsnake passed away to unknown circumstances I essentially stopped owning reptiles for about 8 years. A few weeks ago I went with a friend to buy some mice to feed a few pythons he had, and i saw a sunglow motley for sale. I had never seen any morphs at all before that point, and i was only familiar with snakes having albino traits. Needless to say i was so impressed with the color & pattern I bought it right away. After researching on the web i found out about all the other morphs and subsequently bought 3 more snakes, which are all doing very well and have shed once each so far.

 

[kimbyra]

Howdy!
I've always liked snakes, but for some reason I have never considered owning one until recently. Last October I asked my daughter what she wanted for her birthday (11th). She said, "a chameleon". We went to look at chameleons. They were expensive, had a lot of environmental requirements, and after researching on the net, I discovered that they are not a beginners pet. So she said she wanted a lizard or a snake. Upon hearing snake, I steered her towards that direction. We picked out a checkered garter and named him Zoomer. We fell in love with Zoomer, who is spoiled in his 29L aquarium with a huge water bowl, fairly quickly. Then, I wanted my own snake, and through surfing the web some more, fell in love with corns. I ordered my first hatchling two weeks ago, but before Adhemar (classic, male) came I went into a local pet store and found an "albino" (looks amel/candy cane to me) tiny corn in a 5 gallon tank with a boa! She was hiding under the small water dish. (I wonder why?!) I went back the next day, and she was in the same place, so I bought her. (I'm fairly sure Clementine is a she.) So now I have two corns, and just ordered a beautiful very orange male normal today. Now I want another girl. This is addictive. They are wonderful pets. I'm still having trouble getting Adhemar to eat since he's been shipped, poor little guy.

 

[Llewella]

I never thought I would ever keep snakes at home!

I was not afraid of snakes, but I thought they wouldnt fit in my life.
8 years ago or so I started with bearded dragons, but my ex-bf took them when we broke up.
My fiance didnt like reptiles at all, he was a bit afraid of them.
But summer '05 I visited a Reptile show with my brother who has aquatic turtles, and I fell in love with gecko's, and also with those cute little cornsnakes.

I was very happy when my fiance agreed to let me have some gecko's.

I started reading on a couple of reptile forums, and started to get more and more interest in cornsnakes.
And after a long talk my fiance also agreed to go to the snakeday with me, to buy two little hatchlings for my birthday.

We agreed on 2 snakes, but now I want more
He knows I really want a blizzard, and he knows of my little wishlist.
As long as I take good care of the reptiles and it wont smell bad, and I wont house any reptiles outside of the reptile room I think he agrees on buying a couple of more corns :sidestep:

 

[RickNC]

I have kept all kinds of reptiles except snakes. So I finally started looking into them and figured a corn would be a good first snake. Except for never seeing the snake except at night I am happy.

 

[diamondlil]

I have always loved birdwatching, nature walks and keeping pets, from normal ones like guineapigs to antfarms, snails and wormeries! I can remember holding a couple of snakes belonging to other people, and collecting wild lizards, slow worms, tadpoles, frogs and newts.
Over the years I got to breed gerbils, finches and guinea pigs. Then my son wanted a leopard gecko, and we made the bad mistake of buying from a petshop an impacted baby that didn't make it. Looked online for all the herp info we could and found a reptile specialist, went to get our leo, and fell in love with the corns. 'Just 1' has turned into 5 so far, plus a deckert's,
(The current avatar is me herping in greece, was chasing little green lizards and found the cutest terrapins in a swamp)

 

[marty.warwick]

I have always been interested in unusual pets, It started in school when I was little when we studied rainforests, After that I was obsessed with exotic animals and really wanted a chameleon, But although snakes were cool back then, I didn't have much of a desire for one, I was much more into lizards, I kept stick insects and a couple years later kept Giant African land snails, in fact I didn't even want them..

For those in the US, the UK used to have this morning show called The Big Breakfast,
And one day while I was at school they had this thing where you could ring up and adopt some baby giant african snails (they threantened they would eat them lol, Lookng back the whole idea of giving them to anyone is harsh)..

My sister rung up and as a joke gave my OTHER sisters name. Surely enough two days later a small faunarium-type container full of substrate and lettuce and a cuttlefish bone was shown to me when I got home from school. Obviously, my sister thought the whole thing was a joke and didn't actually expect to receive some snails, I wasn't a huge fan of snails but I loved animals so I kept them. After a while I guess I was young and my attention was elsewhere and taking care of these lil guys wasn't my thing, But I didn't want them to just die, So I gave them to a experienced breeder

Anyway a couple years ago I started keeping tropical fish and thats still going cool... I always thought about reptiles but was always a bit too scared and thought it was incredibly expensive. But I went to a couple places and held some (it was a ball python that was the inspiration) I've grown to find them so fascinating and I decided. I wanted a snake. I did 4 months of research and going to places and checking hatchlings out, then in january I came home with little baby Travis

 

[wpglaeser]

There seems to be a running theme to these stories: parents not allowing snakes .

Yeah... I've noticed a very bad stereotype of snakes and snake owners from the general public. We got our Oke, GBK, and Jalisco Milk within 3 weeks of each other as Aug/Sep '05s in Oct 2005. When I started telling people and showing pics, most of the reaction was "Hmmmm ... Okayyyyy" Kind of a "what's wrong with you" "why would anybody want a snake?" "the only good snakes are dead snakes" and stories of killing snakes in the yard, etc...

That'd be like somebody telling me they got a puppy and I say "Oh yeah, I had to shoot one of those once. I just got tired of it and when it didn't die from the baseball bat, I had to 12-gauge it..." (never happened...)

I guess snakes are a primal fear, and too many press stories of people getting eaten by their Burmese Pythons and Boas and stuff.

I have pics of all three snakes posted prominently in my office cubicle, yet nobody ever says "OH !!! You have snakes! .... CUTE! What kind? etc, etc...

 

[Kat]

Back when I was in highschool, I had just gone through my second guinea pig, and that poor guinea pig had had so many health problems (malfunctioning rear oil gland and glaucoma to name a few) that my dad had decreed 'no more pets' as he was tired of all the effort that went into them. Well, I snuck around that by picking up one of those little aquarium frogs (dwarf african frog I think) that didn't really take much care at all and already came with its own setup. It came time to change the water, so I asked my dad to pick up some bottled water from the grocery store. He said no, that since we had a charcoal filter on our well water the frog would do fine with stuff from the tap. Guess what? Wrong. So now he owed me a pet.

All through growing up, I kept hearing stories of the garter snakes my mom used to keep as a pet in highschool. Plus I've always had allergies to furry things, so reptiles seemed ideal. I decided I wanted a garter snake. At the same time, one of my mom's friends was telling her about these cool snakes she used to catch in the cornfields when she lived in Kansas. (Guess what those were?) Went to the petstore to buy a snake, and they were out of garters but had two normal cornsnakes. I wound up with both. Unfortunately, due to ignorance on my part at the time and some bad advice from the petstore, they didn't make it. (In retrospect they weren't that healthy to begin with.)

A friend of mine turned out to have kept cornsnakes previously, and between her and the Cornsnake Manual, I decided to try ordering some from a knowledgable breeder instead (and she piggybacked on my order). Since then, the collection has grown and grown. Not too long after, I bumped into Serpwidgets. The genetics part helps keep things interesting too. It's always been fun planning new projects, even if they never reach fruition.

-Kat

 

[curiousL]

My boyfriend got me started. I have to admit he had a lot of snakes when I met him and then of course I bought him more for V-day but then we have purchased quite a few together so there are a few I can call mine and his. We just got a great adult pair from Tom Thompson and they are gorgeous. I really like them and have had to watch the addiction because the pockets can be empty for so long. I never thought I would like them so much! Go figure, loves crazy you know!!! :crazy02:

 

[Jay@PJCReptiles]

HI snake lovers! I have never had snakes but not really afraid of them. Jay used to have a burmese. We were at our nephew's and Jay thought it would be funny to scare me with a ball python....wrong! I took him and cuddled him and said I want him. My nephew needed to find him a home and we took it home. Jay was stunned that I liked the snake. We looked into several types of snakes and settled in to corns yet we do have a boa, a rat snake, and ball pythons. Jay has an itch for a jungle carpet python too! I am so amazed at how many people out there have snakes! I love it! We have our first clutch due to drop very soon and I cant wait! :crazy02:
Smiles
PJ & Jay
~*PJCReptiles*~ :wavey:

 

[starsevol]

I have always loved all animals. The only thing keeping me from getting a snake was that they supposedly ate live rodents. Being a soft hearted idiot that ruled out snakes for me. In 1994 I got a blue tongue skink for my birthday. Well actually I got the money to purchase him for my birthday. I got him from Weiss Reptiles in Florida. Because of him, I joined my local reptile club and discovered the joys of frozen mice. I spent about a year thinking that rosy boas were my snake of choice and acquired quite a few. Then at an expo I met a 9 year old girl and her dad that had 2 corns, a normal and a ghost. I fell in love. I got Calvin, my amel, shortly after. I then acquired desert kings, a cal king, ball pythons, a grey banded king, and several more corns. The grey band and one of the desert kings passed away. The balls and other kings were later sold. I still have the rosys but love my corns most of all.

 

[Tom Tuttle]

A very long time ago

I began catching snakes ,turtles, salamanders and everything else that couldn't out run me as a child.That was about the time we had a president named Kennedy.I've been addicted ever since! Got my first cornsnake in second grade (mail order through our school). :cheers:



Lara & Vinny I'm glad your happy with your purchase! :cheers:

 

[Rosebear]

Oddly enough, I'm one who was absolutely terrified of snakes...any and ALL snakes for well over 45 years (who says an older dog can't learn a new trick??). Then, my best gal pal was given an 8 yr. old 5+ foot amel corn and set up by her mentor teacher. Since he was used to being handled a lot, she kept him at school...where I was working. She was very respectful about my phobia, always keeping Spot outside the office and far enough away from me so I didn't panic. I grew up in rattlesnake country and was taught that all snakes were dangerous. So, having a conversation with someone who was draped in a lovely colored creature was decidedly different. I finally got brave enough to stand less than 5 feet from her, and Spot didn't want to be near ME! I asked why, and she told me he could sense my fear, and with me being so much bigger than him, he was threatened by me. Well...that simply wouldn't do! I'm an animal lover, and it bothered me a lot that he was frightened of me! The next thing I knew I was stroking his back, and visiting the reptile cages when we were in the pet store picking up supplies. My husband's jaw bounced off the floor the first time I called a snake "pretty." But...since he harbored a secret desire to have reptiles, he graciously offered to give me a snake for Christmas in '04. Legoless is a sweet male normal who's grown up to be quite a big boy so far, and we added Takala, a female Abbott's Okeetee this fall. Oh...and my gal pal? She has Takala's future mate...Snakespeare!

 

[Requiem]

I met a couple of friends at work who are working to become exotic breeders... I've always had a great interest in snakes and I decided I wanted to buy one as a pet. After consideration and discussion, they convinced me that a corn snake would be a good buy. So, I asked them to pick one up for me at a reptile show. They did and I ended up with my oketee, Xakkima.

I didn't realize it'd end up being an addiction, but I certainly don't regret it.