The Animal Support Hall is always full of life. Whether it’s a Sunday morning with one keeper and one volunteer inside or a Thursday right before lunch with eight keepers and five volunteers. Today the hall was used for exercise. Our opossums Sonny and Cher are a bit on the heavy side so we place their daily diet in various places around the hall and let them wander in search of their goodies.
This afternoon while doing snake enrichment, I was practicing using a snake hook with one of our corn snakes. This is what he wanted to do instead.
Eee, y’all! Hi! I just found y’all’s blog, and am cruising back entries, because that’s the kind of person I am. And I have a question!!!
What all do you do for snake enrichment? I have a hognose, and I suspect she is terribly bored. However, she hates being picked up and hisses like a steam engine (as hoggies do!), continuing to hiss and run around her cage after being put down just in case I didn’t get the message. How can I give her some more snakey fun in her life? I put little tubes and stuff in her cage, but she doesn’t seem to use them…
Hi there,
Thanks so much for checking out our blog and reading past entries. We do enrichment for snakes three times a week right now. One day is handling for at least 5 minutes, another day is adding natural materials, such as leaves, river rocks, pinestraw, pinecones, twigs, non-animal scents, soil, moss, or hay. And the last day also has to do with their habitat but less natural materials such as t-shirt, fake plants, paper lunch bags, cardboard or pvc tubes, snake rattle (old medicine containers with a couple beans or small rocks inside), grass mats, ramps, shredded paper, mirrors, brush, or various sleeping logs.
Each animal reacts differently to enrichment, but changing a snakes habitat has the greatest enrichment potential. We only add one of the above enrichment items at a time and we switch it up week to week to keep it novel. I hope this helps!