Starter
Not so new Member
I got my 4 new snakes - and they are huge! They are two pairs, one pair of Bredli and one pair of Murray Darlings, between 5 and 8 years old, and really big. I have got two fully equipped enclosures, about 5 feet (150cm) high and 2-3 feet wide and deep, and two water tanks, about 4 feet wide, and all these enclosures appear too small to me. I have also a fully equipped large cattery cage outdoors, and so I risked to put the snakes together in there. First the two females together, and they were friendly and loved the place. There are hiding boxes and cat trees to climb on, wind-protected basking places, etc. I also put a bathtub with water in there and mounted a heat lamp on the ceiling for the night (outdoor temperatures go down to 6 degrees these days). After a few hours, I added the MD male, and he was friendly with the girls and happy there, too. Over night, the girls chose to sleep in cat tree boxes, the boy cuddled himself underneath a blanket near the heat lamp. Today, I took the MD boy out and put the Bredli boy in. He also was friendly with the girls and happily explored everything. All these pythons have been kept separately by now and have never met anyone of their own kind before.
My question: Can I dare to put the second male back into the large enclosure, so two males share the same enclosure with the females? I read that, during breeding season, males tend to fight and would bite each other. What about outside of the breeding season? The Bredli male is the only one out of the four who by now showed aggression - he tried to bite me several times (and then bit me indeed into my worker's glove when I took him out of his small enclosure). I fed him a rat yesterday to calm him down (the other ones refused to eat yesterday), but today he was just as aggressive towards me when I took him out. However, with the female snakes he is fine. Could it be dangerous to expose him to the other male? What do I do when they start fighting? Is it difficult to separate fighting snakes? As I said, they are huge, fully grown pythons. Even the males are about 3 metres long.
My question: Can I dare to put the second male back into the large enclosure, so two males share the same enclosure with the females? I read that, during breeding season, males tend to fight and would bite each other. What about outside of the breeding season? The Bredli male is the only one out of the four who by now showed aggression - he tried to bite me several times (and then bit me indeed into my worker's glove when I took him out of his small enclosure). I fed him a rat yesterday to calm him down (the other ones refused to eat yesterday), but today he was just as aggressive towards me when I took him out. However, with the female snakes he is fine. Could it be dangerous to expose him to the other male? What do I do when they start fighting? Is it difficult to separate fighting snakes? As I said, they are huge, fully grown pythons. Even the males are about 3 metres long.