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Feeding Diamond Pythons
This aggressive, ever-ready feeding response has lead many keepers to overfeed their diamonds. Thinking they always want to and (mistakenly) NEED to feed, the well meaning, but somewhat ignorant keeper obliges and ends up inadvertently overfeeding the poor snake, leading to obesity and unavoidable deleterious health hazards. I can’t say it any other way, or ever enough: Do not feed diamonds at the same rate as most other pythons. Mine get fed about six months out of the year, and oftentimes less than ten regular-sized meals during that time. They always seem hungry, but that’s the nature of an opportunistic feeder. Believe me, they don’t need a lot of food! A diamond python, whether young or old, should be a lean, muscular, highly alert animal that is always wishing it had more to eat. Since nature rarely provides too much food (probably she never does...), wild diamonds simply spend their lives hungry. Of all the snakes I’ve caught in the wild, from rattlesnakes to tri colors, to boas, pythons and anacondas, I’ve never caught or even seen a fat snake. So why should we overfeed them in captivity?
Overfeeding diamonds is one of my pet peeves. You might as well try to raise them in the freezer, because if you overfeed diamonds, that’s where they’re eventually going to end up. As noted earlier, overfeeding LEADS to health complications. NOT might lead to health complications, it LEADS to health complications - like dead snakes through the many risks of obesity. Rapid growth is not something diamond pythons experience in the wild, and in captivity, with a general reduction in exercise, it turns into a detriment.
Diamonds take four to five years to reach maturity. Sure, it can be done in two, but you’ll most likely have a pin headed snake with an obscenely obese, unhealthy body. It will have poor bone density, over taxed internal organs, and a very limited potential for breeding or a long life span. In the urgent rush to quickly reproduce this serpent, usually to gain eagerly sought revenues (the wrong reason to keep any snake, if you ask me...) many a snake keeper has rushed their diamond python to an early grave. Once again, you can do it with tri colors and some pythons, like Burmese, but you CAN’T do it with the highly specialized, temperate diamond python.
This care sheet is Copyright of Stan Chiras and can be found at http://sthcoastherpsociety.bizland.com/diamondpaper.chtml