Thank you for the reply & the advice on Olives. I’m glad I mentioned I was looking at them because this has been very helpful. I did see a few childrens pythons I liked the look of - didn’t realise they have so many variations. I’d definitely be keeping them seperate, I think I’m just a lil nervous about that very small chance of them being an escape artist & finding a dead pet as a result.
Damn that would’ve been scary, I am sorry to hear about your bad experience earlier on & the injuries. That would not be fun to heal up from. I’m so glad that I did mention looking at them on here now, your reply has been super helpful. They sound like a lot of fun to work with but also a lot to handle. I’ve been digging the MD carpet pythons as well but I’m unsure if it’d grow too fast for me to learn with it as it grows.
I will definitely be doing more research into Antaresia. I think the reason I was leaning more towards a bigger & more complex snake than Antaresia is because I enjoy learning as well as a challenge so was open to a snake that might be more complex & learning first hand (after researching) as it grows up with me but after reading your reply about Olives they do not seem like the best choice for me. Thank you again for the help.
Haha, no sympathy needed for me; as a stupid young fella I found it fun, as do typical boys who think they're immortal and invincible, and decades later I laugh when thinking about it.
Snake people usually laugh about being bitten, especially when there's a lot of blood. If this doesn't sound like your persona, I definitely recommend Antaresia!
Generally speaking, Olives as adults handle well and many are referred to as 'gentle giants', but they're all individuals and sometimes the gentle ones are the most dangerous because you'll have your guard down on that one day when you didn't wash your hands after playing with the cat and the snake goes into feeding mode and does its best to kill you. I don't have that problem with the aggressive one because before walking into the room I already know what she's going to do so I'm on guard before she knows I'm there.
A large Carpet bite will usually not be a big deal or particularly painful, but if it's on the hand or any joint it can be very painful and potentially put your hand out of action for a few days. Typically you'll be fine, I'm talking about the sort of thing you may never experience, but it's a possibility, and I've seen countless examples (and many years ago I've personally had hands out of action thanks to Carpets, but I'm sure you'd be more careful than I was back then, and it mainly happened to me because I wasn't careful and I worked with a lot of snakes, heck, as a teenager I was stupid enough not to even use feeding tongs!).
If you want a Carpet you'll probably be fine, they will probably recognise your cats as food (by smell, so that includes things which smell like cats, and sometimes Carpets even eat things like a blanket a cat was sitting on, or a shirt someone was wearing while cuddling a cat), but plenty of people keep Carpets and cats in the same house, and most often there aren't any significant problems. When I was a teenager living in the same house as my mother and her cats only one of them was killed by one of my snakes... and she was supposed to keep her cats out of that area anyway...
At the end of the day, if you really want a Carpet, get a Carpet, if you're careful you will most likely have no trouble. Most people who just have one or two snakes don't have any such incidents. I may be making it sound like mishaps are very common, but I'm talking about what I've seen in my experiences with snakes involving hundreds of snake keepers over decades on three different continents, and most of those characters, myself included, are no doubt far more crazy than you are.
I'd also say that life is too short to be scared of being bitten by a Carpet Python, and hey, of all the friends I've had who worked with snakes, only one has been killed by a python
