About The Painted Python
How The Painted Python Started
Thank you for visiting The Painted Python. We are excited for the opportunity to share our passion for these snakes with our customers. It all started with one, seemingly harmless, wild type Ball Python. After some research on the internet we soon became enlightened as to the seemingly endless variations of these snakes. Soon we realized that extraordinary mutations were not limited to just Ball Pythons, but other snakes as well such as Blood Pythons and Carpet Pythons. The colors and patterns we discovered were so outrageous they seemed to have been painted right on the snakes. We were hooked!
We began acquiring one snake after another, always striving for the best quality, not the best price. After all, a painting is only as good as the palette used to create it. We are so very grateful for the palette that nature has provided us and hope you will find our creations to be masterpieces that rival those of Van Gough and Picasso. Please enjoy the pages to follow and feel free to comment. We’d love to hear from you!
The Painted Python Facility
The Painted Python is located amongst the towering Saguaros and boulder strewn mountains of Scottsdale, Arizona. The warm weather and 330 days of sunshine a year make it an ideal spot to breed snakes, despite the occasional summer time highs of 118 degrees.
The Sonoran Desert. Home of The Painted Python.
For those of you familiar with the area, we are in Troon North, the heart of the golfing community here in Arizona.
We take great pride in our facility. The health of our snakes is our number one priority so we do our best to take measures to ensure their continued health. This starts first and foremost with the snakes’ cages. We currently use a combination of Freedom Breeder racks and the very flexible Vision racks.
The Freedom Breeder racks are primarily used for the adult breeder Ball Pythons. We made some slight modifications to the racks by placing some self-stick linoleum tiles on the back 2/3 of each level. We did this at the suggestion of our buddy, Chris Lipps, to help retain the humidity we so desperately lack here in Arizona.
Freedom Breeder rack used to house adult Ball Pythons
The juvenile pythons are housed in the Vision racks due to their flexibility. We can configure the racks to hold a bunch of small tubs perfect for hatchling ball pythons and then as they grow, reconfigure the rack to hold slightly fewer of the medium sized tubs until the juvenile Ball Pythons finally graduate to a full size tub in the Freedom Breeder rack.
For substrate we use newspaper. We have been through the Sani-Chips, Shredded Aspen and Cypress Mulch but found them to be expensive, bulky and time consuming to clean. The newspaper allows us to quickly remove it, spray the cage down with Nolvasan (chlorhexidine diacetate) for a quick cleaning and replace the paper. This makes it very easy to spot uneaten rodents and also forces a full cleaning rather than a spot cleaning.
The problem with the newspaper is it obviously does not hold moisture. The air in our part of the country can drop to about 8% humidity in the summer. To combat this, we use a whole room humidifier which keeps the humidity at about 60%.
Ryan sherman of The Painted Python
One common problem with humidifiers is the “white dust” they produce which is in part due to the mineralization of the water. It produces a fine white dust that covers just about every surface. To prevent this we use only RO water in the humidifier. To help filter the air of odors, dust, pollen and VOC’s (volatile organic compounds) we use a combination of Hepa filters, Ionizers and UV Filtration. In addition to clean air, we also believe in clean water. We use disposable deli cups for water, which we obtain from Superior Shipping Supplies, that we change out approximately once a week or as needed.
All of our pythons are under the Veterinary supervision of Todd Driggers, DVM of Foothills Mobile Exotics in Gilbert, AZ. He can be reached at (480) 706-8478.
