Re: When did Ball pythons become officially known as a pet in the United States

I'm doing a project about snakes for my final in my Small Animal Management class. the snakes that I chose was the Ball Python. The question that I'm having is this: When did the Ball Python become officially known as a pet in the United States? I have looked at almost every book, article, and website, and I still cant find any thing to answer the question.

Hi Molly,

I'm not an herpetology expert, but I've done some reading, and it seems clear that ball pythons did not become popular as pets until after Bob Clark bred an albino ball python in captivity in 1992¹. Prior to the development of captive breeding programs in the US, ball pythons were purchased from importers², a practice that likely had been occurring since the 1960s³. I've found references to ball pythons being kept and sold as pets and for collectors in the 1970s⁴ and 1980s⁵.

However, I'm not sure that there is an "official" US pet designation. People have kept snakes as pets for thousands of years ^{6, 7}, and probably for longer than we have been keeping written records. So, a ball python in particular might just have been "another snake" as far as a hypothetical official registry of pets was concerned. I think a good answer to your question is, "snake-lovers in the US began keeping ball pythons as pets in the 1960's".

References:
[1] http://www.bobclark.com/articles/199603.html
[2] http://www.reptilesmagazine.com/Ball-Python-Morph-History/
[3] https://weberexotics.wordpress.com/2011/09/29/a-brief-history/
[4] http://www.worldofballpythons.com/breeders/ralph-davis-reptiles
[5] http://animals.mom.me/piebald-pythons-2480.html
[6] http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Suetonius/12Caesars/Tiberius*.html#72.2
[7] http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0160:book=2:chapter=28