Can you cohab house snakes? A deep dive into what we do, and do not, know about house snake cohabitation.

Can I cohab? A deep dive into what we do, and do not, know about house snake cohabitation

There has been a rise in conversation on the topic of cohabbing house snakes. 

The question is often put as “can you cohab house snakes”? Absent of disability you very likely can wrangle two animals into the same box together. Its a physical possibility. So yes, you likely can. That's not what you really want to know though. The question is, should you? How can you know if it’s right for you?

Well, let's talk about that. 

First off, let me say that I'm not against the practice. In fact I cohab my egg eaters myself, but it's irresponsible to endorse it without informing people that it has risks so that they can make informed decisions for themselves and their animals.

How can we make the best choice?

The assessment of benefit vs risk is considered the biases of what defines ethical practice in healthcare and veterinary fields. That's something that I've been raised with and was repeated to me over and over again in college. So when I'm making decisions for my animals I'm always weighing benefit vs risk, and if the risk doesn't outweigh the benefit *for the animal* I don't do it or vice versa. That's what you need to do too. It's a deeply personal decision. I can not answer it for you- but I hope to give you tools.

Cohabitation absolutely can be done ethically, but you need to be willing to hear every variable in order to make that informed decision required of ethical keeping. 

Let's start with the hard part, risk. Here are the potential risks for cohabbing your house snakes, with some ways to reduce those risks:

• Accidental (or otherwise) death or injury during feeding:
  We don't like to talk about it, but it needs to be said. Housies have strong feed responses and one of the risks is that one could end up accidentally killing the other if a feeding episode goes wrong. 
  
  To lessen this risk, feed each individual separately, or place barriers between while feeding. Some house snakes do not eat outside their cages or when security has been compromised so you may need to find creative solutions to promote animal safety. 

 

• Fighting and cannibalism not related to food:
  Yes house snakes can and do fight sometimes. You should always have a spare place to separate them, if they happen to fight. Cannibalism has also been recorded in house snakes both within captivity and in the wild. It's very rare, but we can't say it never happens. It has. 
  
  There really isn’t much you can do if two house snakes are prone to fighting, but separate them. You can reduce the risk of cannibalism by making sure every animal in the group stays well fed, and by only keeping animals together that are similar in size. 

 

• Stress and even poor health related to competition for resources:
  ​If one animal isn't getting access to hides, heat, egg laying sites, or water, due to competition with others, they may become ill or even die. 
  
  Reduce this risk by offering multiple sites that offer basking, hiding, egg laying, and water access. This way, even if they don't get their first choice pick of these resources, other resources are available. 

 

• Potential disease and parasite transmission across the animals kept together: 
  
  ​If one gets sick, it's likely they all will. In animals that are identical (say all blacks) if you are unable to tell them apart that can really complicate treatment too.
  
  Lessen this risk by keeping a sharp eye on your cohabbed snakes and quarantine any with symptoms immediately. It is prudent to run parasite tests on members of the colony as well; some parasites can reach a colony via prey items offered or even soil. From there, fecal transmission is the most common route and as they are sharing that space exposure is inevitable. 
  
  Which brings me to poop. Another factor here is the waste. Each animal has its own internal fauna that are excreted in its poop. If one animal's fauna (or viral load etc) is very different from another's, their exposure to it could give them issues. It's one of potentially many issues related to immunological naivety. Also more waste being excreted equals a rise in risk of respiratory and skin infections if the enclosure isn't maintained properly. 
  
  Immunological naivety isn't something you can prevent, but you can treat most of the time. In this example you could rebalance the gut flora after it happens. You need to be on top of this and catch it early, a loss of gut flora creates a situation called “refeed syndrome” a potentially fatal situation. Be on the look out for regurgitation of partial or completely undigested prey with no other obvious cause. In a cohabbed enclosure it may be difficult to figure out which one has it to treat them, so you may need to treat them all.
  
  Be sure to keep your enclosure clean, and check their belly scales often to prevent scale rot, just like you'd do with individually housed animals.

 

• Mixed sex ( and sometimes accidentally mixed sex) groups have the additional risk of breeding problems. 
  
  Breeding an animal too young is problematic for their longevity and quality of life. This is well documented across many species of reptile and mammal (including our own by the way). 
  
  I've said it before and I'll say it again, wait for your females to be good and ready. This isn't some virtue signaling when I say that, I don't want you to make the mistakes *I made* and pay the price. So please, don’t cohab a young girl with a mature male. 
  
  The risk we cannot ignore is dystocia (egg binding). It's a medical emergency that has to be caught early, and promptly tended to, or it's fatal. You have a way, way, higher risk of this in a girl not ready than a mature female. It’s the same reason why pregnancy in girls is problematic for us. Internal structures are still small and the eggs may or may not be.
  
  Also, In a cohabbed enclosure, if it's not obvious which animal is the one laying, you may not be able to tell which one has a retained egg, and time is of the essence. I was just walking through this with someone the other day, the girl didn't look gravid at all, and retained not one but 6 eggs. She passed away from sepsis. That's a risk you should know about and try to prepare for. 
  
  Lessen this risk by not cohabbing a young female with mature males, not cohabbing animals you aren't certain of the sex of, and having an established relationship with a qualified exotics veterinarian that offers emergency appointments for snakes ahead of time.
  
  Another one is over breeding. Yes, that can happen. There is a point where an animal's body has nothing left to give and if you don't break them of it, they will die. House snakes are very smart, but some will breed themselves to death.  I've personally been brought to a point of hair pulling frustration when a female just continued to clutch after clutch (slugs after the first two) even after taking actions to break the cycle and I had to make the decision to sterilize her to save her life. I've also seen males refuse to eat for months upon months while their bodies were just wasting away- because they just wanted to keep breeding. These were not even animals that were being cohabbed. In a cohabbing situation mixed sex animals will continue to breed over and over again. The risk in this situation is high in mixed sex enclosures.
  
  I do not recommend keeping mixed sex groups together long term. These are dangerous risks you can not prevent.

 

• Additional risks related to same sex mature cohabbed animals:
  
  When housing mature females together, and allowing males brief incursions into their enclosure for breeding purposes, it can be difficult to assess which animal laid which eggs. That can make the identification of genetics of those hatchlings difficult to impossible even. This becomes a real pain if you have any ‘hidden genes’ pop up, something you really can't account for. This is compounded further if you paired more than one male with different genes involved. 
  
  Lessen this risk by bringing your females individually to your male of choice when using more than one, separate during laying or at least keeping a sharp eye on your enclosures during due dates to try to catch a female in the act of laying. It is critically important that every female have her own access to a suitable laying site to prevent egg binding discussed above.
  
  And as for males… well, homosexuality has been documented in male house snakes. Yep, here’s a research paper on that. Which means even in same sex cohabbing you may still need to separate a homosexual snake from his group if he decides to breed himself to death or causes undue stress to the other inhabitants. That would be a rare one of course, but hey, it could happen. 
  
  Not much you can do about a homosexual snake but separate them. 

Aaaand on that note, we have a fairly full scope of the risks involved. There may be more, and feel free to message if you know of others that should be included.

Now Let's talk about benefits.

The word benefit is defined by the dictionary as “an advantage or profit gained from something”. So what advantage does a cohabbed snake have over those in solidarity?

This really boils down to what standard of proof do you need to be comfortable for your risk level assessment? Do you need that hard species specific scientific evidence that there is benefit? Or does anecdotal work for you? Only you can answer that. 

For those with scientific needs, welp,  I have university level access to every research depository online and I really wanted to be able to formally document this page with irrefutable evidence, but to be completely transparent: Species specific, scientific evidence does not exist to support there is any measurable advantage in cohabitating house snakes over keeping them solitary. 

Now before you get me wrong, I'm not saying there isn't any benefit. I'm just being upfront about the fact I don’t have hard evidence for me to support it like I would usually have before releasing this information to you. There's not a lot of funding for reptile research in the first place, nonetheless studies on these species, and this one just hasn't been studied to the level that we can say any of this has evidence that could stand up to unbiased scientific scrutiny in regards to house snakes specifically. The truth is we don't have that.

But hey If you think you have found some, please feel free to contact me and I will happily update this page with it. 

So what we do have is anecdotes from keepers, and inferences we could possibly take from other species. Some are more helpful than others.

Moving on. It is said that the potential benefits for cohabbing mainly focus upon these two: A calmer demeanor, and social opportunity. Those are fantastic benefits that anyone would want for their snake. So let’s take a look at the sources and evidence behind them. 

Anecdotal evidence strongly exists for a calmer demeanor:

Some keepers report that their communally kept house snakes are calmer than they were before they were communally kept. There's no reason to question the validity of their experience. Keepers often know things long before the scientific community does.  There is anecdotal evidence if you look for it. 

As for scientific literature…. Maybe?

One study frequently cited in forums in support of cohabbing, which you can read here, was performed with Rattlesnakes, and found possible evidence that rattlesnakes may be calmer with a friend: This study measured heart rate (HR) and rattling to determine stress level and tested how the snakes reacted to a stressor.

    Here's some excerpts:

• “Our results supported just one of the three hypotheses tested: emotional tachycardia (change in HR) after exposure to an acute stressor was reduced in the presence of a conspecific [a companion], suggesting that social buffering exists in the species”

But also concludes,

• “The subdued cardiac response to an acute stressor when in the presence of a companion supported our first hypothesis that social buffering exists in the species. However, while the effect was significant at lower levels of baseline HR, we could not detect it at higher levels of baseline HR”. 

In short, the effect only happens if the animal isn't worked up much… which begs the question of how we can conclude having a friend calms an animal if the only time it works is when the animal doesn't need calming?

And perhaps less encouraging,

• “The rattling component of the defensive response seemed to be reduced by either the presence of a conspecific [a companion] or an inanimate object”. And then continues “Defensive behaviors of rattlesnakes are often context dependent, and the perception of cover may influence the adoption of an anti-predatory strategy… the snakes in the bucket might have perceived less vulnerability when in physical contact with the rope [the inanimate object] or another conspecific,.. and therefore rattled less.”
  
  

So one could easily conclude the effect was due to having anything at all in with them given that the presence of an inanimate object also produced the same effect with no companion present. 

So… Maybe? Form your own conclusions of course, but for me this really isn't strong enough evidence to support the claim. Again, just because this doesn't prove it, doesn't mean it can't be true. There's no reason to distrust the anecdotal evidence. So we go back to what is your personal standard of evidence? 

Next we have “social behavior” 

Several of the pro- cohabbing literature refer back to this study, when positing that snakes may have social relationships, based on the fact that some species are known to  aggregate (occupy the same space) in the wild. It states,

• “An examination of the literature indicates that the nature of the relationship between individuals is crucial in determining whether or not social buffering will occur. Other factors that affect social buffering, either directly or by influencing the social relationship, include the social organization of the species”

In short, animals that are communal are more likely to exhibit social behavior than those that live solitary lives. Again, the sources referenced there are based on mammals, but for the sake of exploring this, let's assume it's true. The take away from many of these studies being that animals that have perceived benefit from communal living, tend to be communal in the wild. The strongest evidence to support sociality in snakes all comes from studies done with communal snakes as well (namely garter snakes). So this does make logical sense.. 

So are house snakes communal? 

Overwhelmingly more evidence points to them being solitary than communal. House snakes are typically not seen together outside of a few circumstances.

One is breeding season, which is a biologically driven event that pretty much all species partake in. There are also some sightings of them being found together in the wild, typically two or so at a time, typically in the winter, in areas of limited shelter. One might conclude this is less about social gathering than survival. 

You will not find a large “den” (or hibernacula) of a large number of house snakes together in the wild. They just aren't garters or rattlesnakes.

If you search for wild sightings of house snakes on sites such as INaturalist, you will find the overwhelming amount of them are single sightings. There's also recorded sightings of house snakes eating each other in the wild. 

This suggests that, in the wild, house snakes aren't likely to be social in the way that garter snakes or rattlesnakes are presumed to be. But people will regularly point to studies done with communal snakes as evidence that house snakes or even *all* snakes are social in captivity. Lets think critically here. That's a leap. 

Here's the most viewed one I found. 

In two studies done by the same author, which recently became more popular due to youtube viewership, 

They studied

• “a group of 6 eastern gartersnakes over the first year and a half of their lives. We placed the snakes in an arena for 8 days and recorded the time that they spent in physical proximity to each other. We repeated this 8-day process 7 times across the snakes’ development.” 

So they used their relative position to each other, in a closed space, to define their “social networks”. Then, 

• “The snakes’ social networks were perturbed twice a day by “shuffling” their locations. Despite these disturbances, the snakes eventually re-formed their preferred social environment.” 

And thus concluded with much confidence,

• “Snakes are often considered nonsocial animals, but this is inaccurate”. 

Oh boy. If you look through the references you will see that the assumptions made here on what counts as “social networking” were backed mostly by research done on primates. I hope you can see why that's problematic. 

Yes, monkeys do stand near each other. People who like each other tend to stand near each other. That doesn't mean we can apply that logic to a very limited number of snakes being kept in a box. Those snakes could just as easily be reforming groups based on available resources and dominance. It is a hilariously bold statement to conclude all snakes are social based on nothing but the fact some snakes of this species returned to similar positions after being shuffled inside a box. 

And folks, 6 or 10 animals is nowhere near a statistically significant sample size to be drawing broad conclusions about even that species, and in no way should be considered hard data for an entirely different species.

I can go on, but folks, the more literature you read, the more you will find that it all is referencing back to each other, and all similarly flawed in structure. So with much disappointment, I can not say with my usual flair of scientific accuracy that we can take anything but our own anecdotes too seriously based on what ive been able to find thus far.  The data is painfully weak.

Folks, anthropomorphism is a real thing. Sometimes we want to see parts of ourselves in other organisms. And that's not a bad thing! It helps us to relate and have empathy towards them, makes us treat them better and that's a very good thing. But that doesn't make it fact. Science doesn't operate on feelings and intentions. Fact requires evidence. 

This matters because when we continue to present conjecture as fact, we weaken the credibility of real science in the minds of those who may need most convincing once it’s presented. And it's ok to accept that we’re not there yet. We might very well get there eventually. 

That's not the end of the story either.  We're talking about seriously intelligent snakes here. It's entirely possible that the confines of captivity may produce sociality as a means of adaptation to captive life in cohabitation. We have not ruled that out. 

So do you need hard science to assess benefit or no? The most honest statement we can make here is, no we cant prove it, but there’s plenty of reason to believe your fellow keeper if they say they’ve experienced it. Afterall, they know their snakes better than you.

If you need hard science to weigh the scales with, that may be the end of the conversation for you. That's ok too. 

So, we have some understanding of the risk and benefits.

The ethical choice is the one you make where you believe the benefit to the animal outweighs the risk. Let’s get to the nitty gritty of making the decision. 

First let's address the elephant in the room. There are ethical motivations for cohabbing snakes, and there unethical motivations. 

One motivation people may have to consider cohabitation is for the ability to increase the number of snakes they can breed in a given space. In puppy mill style commercial outfits that may just be the main motivation. More production. No regard for the risk. I ask you, is that a benefit to the kept, or to the keeper?  It's easy to rule in favor of a benefit for yourself when it's not your life at risk. In the benefit vs risk scenario, an unethical keeper is willing to take risks because their benefit is the only consideration. That’s not ethical. 

How do you tell that type apart from those who do it ethically? By example.

Those that cohab for ethical reasons are the type that want to provide a rich environment where every possible venue of improvement in quality of life is considered and provided. They do this to give to the snake, not to themselves. They’ve understood, prepared for, and done everything they can to mitigate the risks to the animals involved with doing so. They have the resources to deal with any surprises. They carefully weighed the scales and found they had the ability to (at least try to) provide a benefit that would outweigh the risk in their mind. 

That's what ethical cohabitation looks like. A respectful conscientious attempt to provide what one believes is the best possible quality of life. It's a beautiful thing, and should not be feared or discouraged. 

Is that you?

Maybe it's not a question for you, maybe you’re trying to assess the ethics of a person that is promoting or engaging in it. Here's some things to consider:

In your exposure with them have they shown that they thoroughly thought through the decision? If they don't care enough to even look into it, their motives may not be entirely ethical. Are they informing you of the risks so you can make an informed decision? Or are they downplaying the risks, and that's the whole conversation?

Have they done what they can to mitigate the risks themselves? If you're looking at their caging, are you seeing species appropriate climates with multiple sites that offer basking, hiding, egg laying, and water access, or are you seeing cramped space with multiple animals that will need to share resources? It's one thing to know, and another to show. 

Are they unwilling to show their own set ups? Those ethically cohabbing are frontiers, they know and respect that they are doing something that others will want information on. They often want to share their experience. The truly mature ones will share their mistakes too. If they seem to have something to hide, you're justified in having a curiosity over why. 

Are they showing that they really weren't prepared? I'm not talking about some common “ the vet is on vacation halp!” kind of stuff that could happen to any of us. Im talking about “I cohabbed these but dont have a spare enclosure whatsoever so I put one of my snakes in a shoebox and taped it shut when they fought, and now im asking the community how to get one safely off the tape at 3am” type stuff. Yes that did happen before (facepalm).

Point is there are ways to do it right and there are ways to do it wrong. 

If you can be honest with yourself about your motivations, abilities, risk tolerance, and resources, plus know your snakes well- than yeah you absolutely could be an ethical cohabber. If the scales don’t weigh in the favor of you cohabbing, there's nothing wrong with that either. Again, it's a deeply personal decision. 

I hope that in some small way, writing this article has helped you in your process of making it. :)