Hi! I'm trying to figure out the best sizes for my future snake enclosures. I love exo terra, but after looking at snake blogs I see animal plastics is very reputable, I was just wondering how secure their cages are when compared to exo terra if you know? As for the sizes, I have a brooks kingsnake and will have a Brazilian rainbow boa in the future. For the kingsnake I'm planning on a 36x18x12, but was wondering if 18 would be a better height? For boa would a 36L be ok, or would I need 48?
Hello! Thank you for entrusting me to put knowledge into your brainpan!
I’m going to say up front that I don’t actually know anything about tank sizes for any kind of snakes except ball pythons! In general, though, I’m going to say that if you’re trying to decide between two sizes, and you can afford and also bring yourself to clean both sizes, then I would go bigger and fill it with more hides/plants/etc. It’s Free Real EstateExtra Enrichment!
Animal Plastics, though… oh boy did you ever ask someone with an opinion on this one.
You are absolutely right that AP has an excellent reputation. They also sell an option to add a lock to the door of an enclosure, and it’s not just the little toggle button of an Exo Terra, but an actual keyed lock (albeit with a weird removable locking pin mechanism that they only give you one of even if you specifically request multiple keys and specifically tell them it’s because you’re afraid of losing one. so don’t lose that pin or else you can no longer use your lock – or, armed with the knowledge that there’s a secret piece that you only get one of, request two up front). I can’t imagine a snake getting out any other way besides the door unless you specifically request a large hole be drilled somewhere – maybe if you had a little baby corn snake or something like that, it could get out of one of the existing holes, none of which are bigger than maybe a third of an inch in diameter and that’s not counting the cable that goes through the hole to take most of it up – so the lock should wrap things up pretty tight.
A caveat, though, is that I haven’t actually gotten to put that to the test, because my AP order has been… an experience. I placed it the first week of March, and now, halfway through August, we are finally looking at maybe being able to move our snake into his new home within the next two weeks. Construction took 15 weeks instead of 10-12, with no status updates until the second time I asked; pieces were missing, pieces were broken, we’ve now had three catch-up shipments to try to get everything sorted, and there was no parts list so I will technically never know for sure that I got everything I was supposed to get. Customer service has always been pleasant and apologetic when I can get it, but sometimes my emails asking for assistance go ignored until I send a second snippier email a week later.
It doesn’t make any sense given their reputation, but my experience, anyway, has been a nightmare. I have a feeling most people would be fine with playing the odds, since the AP Experience appears to be awesome 99.98% of the time, and only .02% “at several points over the last two months, tried to convince co-snake-owner to give up trying to make enclosure work so we could just throw it away and be done with it”. Those are good odds! But I won’t be buying from them again.
(But seriously, if you add the lock, also ask for two locking pin things. Just asking for two keys is not sufficient.)
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