How do you tell if its CB...

Well basically what you want to do is check the animal's size. If its 20" or less its only a couple months old and its really unlikely to be wild caught. Look at the weight. A well taken care of CB ball python will have a very fat body from a month or two on. A skinny little snake is not "normal" for a baby unless its truly a baby of two months or less and hasn’t ingested enough fat to bulk up yet.

Check the vent (his bum), always support the full body of the animal and gently pull up on the tail while supporting the ventral scale and have a look. It should be very clean. If you pull the lip back or check in the nose it should also be extremely clean and almost look like its made of plastic especially on a baby. Cracked or "dinged" scales are usually a good indicator of a W/C juvie. If you see any yellow along the lip in the mouth or in the heat pits along the upper lip that’s not good either. Make sure you pull back the skin and look all the way around the eye sockets as well. Mites love it in there. Check the entire snake for Flukes, Mites and ticks. Ticks are fuckin hard to catch on balls because they match the scale size perfectly. SO often you'll just think it’s a big scale until it jumps off and crawls up your arm one day. Lance the little fuckers with a needle coated in phosphoric acid or something equally nasty. Shocks them dead and they let go.

Put the snake's head up to your ear and listen to it breath. If you hear ANYTHING that's bad. You should not hear a snake breath unless it weighs over four Kilos. A slight wheeze is normal in extreeeemely young snakes that still have mucus in their nose or throat. If the animal has eaten, this is a big no no. Clicking or popping, put the animal down and leave.

Check the belly scales. They should all be uniform and even. If you pull them apart the subscale folds should be exactly the same color as the scutes over them (the long scales on the belly). If any of these are pink or yellow don’t get the animal. (Again, an EXTREMELY young animal will have a pinkish belly)

Also push up on the animals throat just behind the head as it exhales. You shouldn't hear anything and no mucus should come out of the nose or mouth.

Feel along the inside of the jaw. The lower jaw is two separate unfused bones linked by cartiledge so its just hollow underneath. Check for any uneven bumps or depressions.

DO NOT feed the animal live food. Take a rat, whack it reeeallly hard in the head, and throw it in. They twitch and run around dead like chickens. Snakes like it even more than a "live" rat, and it can't bite.

I'd rather take a blunt shot to the head than being eaten by a giant scaled creature and being chocked to death... wouldn’t you?

Prekilled is always the way to go. Frozen is bullshit. Feed the rat some Gatorade, Omega 3 vitamins (a little sugar makes rats eat anything...) and some eggs and stuff Nothing overly acidic or anything like that. What you want is to gut load the rat with additional levels of protein, electrolyted and amino acids, as well as beneficial fats. Feeding rats fish food (especially something like krill) is an excellent way to transfer a readily available source of Keratin into the snake and makes for a very "shiney coat". You really notice after a little while.

A snake is like a betta in a bowl that blips in and out of existence intermittently for 12 minutes per week. That's the difficulty factor ;)

Lemme know if you have more questions

Pablo.

OH- and as always with pythons, demand to watch it eat, let it rest for 48 hours, then take it home. And prê kill its food yourself at the store. Any respectable reptile manager will let you do this. If they don’t, leave.