FaunaClassifieds - View Single Post - Can rosy boas be housed together?
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Old 12-29-2016, 11:17 PM   #4
hotlips
How big is the tank? I really advise against it anyway...snakes still 'compete' for the right temperatures & all, so stress results from having room-mates. I've kept for many years & raised some rosies in the past: the only time any were kept together was for breeding, & I saw no incidents of cannibalism, but that can happen with ANY snakes. Remember how good their sense of smell is...they may smell the tiniest bit of rodent scent on the other, say after they've been fed...then accidents happen.

One of the rosy boas I took in years ago came from a museum that was keeping 3 females together in one cage: she had stopped eating & was quite thin...her food refusals had gone on for a couple years, I found out. She did fine with me & they
didn't want her back...clearly stress was involved. A year later the other 2 rosies
still kept by the museum got a nasty bacterial infection that they both died from.
I firmly believe stress is no better for a snake's immune system than it is for ours.

Oh, and the rosy I got from them? She was about 15 years old when I got her and
she lived another 11 years with me, during which she reproduced healthy babies for
5 of those years. I never wanted to breed her (or any rosies) but she produced one
live baby by parthenogenesis after regaining her body weight, but it had all sorts of
defects & died after about 8 months. I didn't want her to produce any more sad cases
like that & especially since she had very poor muscle tone from years of marginal care:
it was terribly hard for her to expel slugs (which she adamantly produced) whereas live babies did most of the "work" of leaving. It was a relief when she'd finally had enough
after 5 litters, but given an unrelated male for a mate, she had nothing but big healthy
offspring that did well, even though she was such an "old lady" with lousy muscle tone.