Rackety-Rack (Don't Talk Back)

The Reptile House, I learned on my first day of volunteering there as a teenager, was like an iceberg.  You only ever saw the tip protruding from the water, in this case the public gallery.  The majority of the collection was tucked away in a series of rooms in the back.  It was here that I was given my first real responsibilities as a (unpaid, closely-monitored) keeper in a zoo - caring for the baby rack.

Almost an entire wall of one room was a rack of what were essentially plastic shoeboxes, each containing a pencil-thin baby snake.  The bulk of them were were Brazilian rainbow boas, but there were a handful of carpet pythons, Madagascar tree boas, hognose snakes, and others, each in a little drawer.  Every day, I'd pull out each drawer, check on the snake, give fresh water, change their paper-towel floor if they needed it, and then move on.  Once a week I'd weigh each one; once a week I'd feed, and the next day check and record if the food had been eaten.  I marveled at how quickly and efficiently I was able to care for dozens of snakes each day.

Maybe I wasn't caring for them as well as I thought.

Rack-keeping has long been used in reptile collections, both public (like in zoos) and private (like pet owners and breeders).  The mindset is basically that by having a minimalistic set-up - paper substrate, a water bowl, a hide box - you can house many more animals (usually snakes) than if you were to give a large terrarium with lots of furnishings to each.    Rack-keepers often make the argument that snakes are secretive and shy, and that being kept in a small, dark enclosure and left undisturbed and out of view 99% of the time is good for the snake's welfare; this viewpoint is especially common among breeders of ball pythons, one of the most popular pet snakes.  This really reflects the common mindset that a snake is basically a tube that you pet food in front of once a week, and that's all it really wants.

At the zoo in question, we were mostly just keeping babies in the rack until they were large enough to graduate to a bigger enclosure or be sent out to other zoos.  Some folks, especially commercial breeders, keep snakes in racks for their entire life.

There's an increasing trend in herp-keeping, both zoo-based and private, that snakes are more complex and more intelligent than people give them credit for being.  They benefit for enclosures large enough to stretch out in and get some exercise in.  They benefit just as much from being able to make choices - where in their enclosure do they want to be, do they want light or darkness, hidden or exposed, to be up high or down low, on what kind of substrate.  A plastic shoebox doesn't allow those options.

Compared to mammals and birds, reptiles and amphibian care standards are very poorly regulated.  With USDA just getting around to (maybe) starting to monitor birds, I don't see reptile welfare getting expanded legal protection anytime soon.  Private folks are gonna do what they're gonna do (and to be clear, many of the best advances in keeping reptiles happy and healthy come from the private sector - it's just that there are a lot of people out there who base everything they do in reptile keeping on a YouTube video or cheap pet store care-sheet).  To me, it just means that zoos have to lead the way in demonstrating the best care for reptiles - both in public and behind-the-scenes.