3
Life in the Wild
Captive husbandry is reverse-engineered from the wild. You cannot understand why we do something in a cage if you do not understand what the animal does outside one. This is the section every shortcut guide skips. We are not skipping it.
Range and habitat
Ball pythons are a savanna animal. Their habitat is a mosaic of grassland, open savanna, sparse dry woodland, forest edge, and — increasingly — the margins of farmland: the same belt of country where people grow yams and cassava and keep goats. The popular image of a ball python coiled in deep tropical foliage is wrong. They live in much drier, more open, and more human-shaped country than most keepers picture, and that fact quietly drives a lot of how we set up their cages.
The full range
Python regius is not a Ghana–Togo–Benin animal that happens to wander a little. …
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