African House Snake (Boaedon Capensis)

Range: South African subcontinent

Life span: 12-15 yr

House snakes are sexually dimorphic, the females grow significantly larger, to about 3 1/2 feet, the males only grow to around 2 feet.

Because they are such aggressive feeders, they frequently end up with some of the cage substrate in their mouths.  Susceptible to opportunistic infections to their oral mucosa (i.e. mouthrot) particularly  after ingesting sharp pieces of cage substrate when eating.  For this reason, I recommend you either keep your snakes on a non-ingestible substrate, such as paper, or feed the snakes in a separate container (with no substrate or paper).

African House Snakes should be housed separately for two reasons: to prevent them from eating each other and to prevent them from mating.  This is not a joke they will breed themselves to death.

Temperature Requirements the substrate should be around 90 F.  The temperature of the substrate at the cool end of the cage should be around 70 F. 

The African House Snake - Feeding

1.  House Snakes will eat anything!

2.  House Snakes should eat alone!

(This aggressive feeding response has its good and bad sides.  Yes, it is easy to get newly acquired house snakes to eat, but they are so overzealous in their eating, that the will frequently attack each other instead of the prey!

This is even true of "well adjusted" captive raised adults.  As soon as one of the snakes finishes swallowing its food, it will begin swallowing the other snakes food, even if the other snake is in the process of swallowing it!  If you don't intervene, you end up with one very fat snake instead of two!  I have even seen house snakes trying to swallow parts of the other snake that smelled like a mouse, from where it had constricted a mouse.

So even if you keep them together at other times, separate house snakes for feeding.

Baby house snakes can present a different problem.  I have seen and heard of several incidences of baby house snakes that were not provided adequate food eating their siblings.)

3.  House Snakes are thin snakes!

(Another of their python-like attributes is their willingness to try to ingest enormous meals.  House Snakes are meant to be lithe, slender snakes.  Trying to "correct" this by overfeeding usually results in premature death of the snake.

I recommend feeding adult house snakes once every week to ten days.  At each feeding, I give them one or two food items that are slightly larger in diameter than their body.  For breeding females, I will sometimes double this food load to help them get their body mass back up to normal between clutches.  Males, on the other hand, don't need much food.)