Mattison’s Keeping and Breeding Snakes by Jonathan Crowe
The OHS News 83 (Fall 1999)

Keeping and Breeding Snakes
by Chris Mattison
Blandford, 1999. Hardcover, 224 pp. ISBN 0-7137-2709-8

The first edition of Chris Mattison’s Keeping and Breeding Snakes appeared in 1988. This second, “fully revised” edition is no mere updating of an earlier work; it is essentially an entirely new book. Its emphases have changed and its text — especially its species accounts — has been rewritten. Gone are the tables with breeding information, and the section on keeping venomous snakes has been reduced to almost an afterthought. The new photographs are nothing less than spectacular, in far more vivid colour than in previous Blandford offerings. In all, the package is quite attractive.

Mattison’s coverage of boas and pythons is very comprehensive, even listing taxa not normally available to the hobby. The exception is his coverage of sand boas, limited to a single species. His coverage of colubrids, in one long chapter, is more uneven, emphasizing the more commonly kept varieties. Rat snake enthusiasts will be very happy with his comprehensive coverage of the genus Elaphe and its allies. The book’s coverage of kingsnakes is less detailed; and only a few, larger subspecies of milk snake are covered, the smaller, “bootlace-sized” subspecies being dismissed as “a waste of time”. Other colubrids get even shorter shrift — a surprising omission is the rough green snake — and several other infrequently kept colubrids present in the first edition have been removed altogether, a decision perhaps understandable if the book is intended for an audience of adult beginners. Still, I wonder why a section on the care of snakes from small families (Typhlopidae, Loxocemidae, Xenopeltidae, Tropidopheidae) was included; surely even glossy snakes (omitted) are more commonly kept than blind snakes (included)! Troubling, too, is the decision to cover only western hognoses, which can feed on mice, without referring to eastern and southern hognoses, which won’t. Mattison makes no mention of the genus’s general toad-feeding preferences, and the omission may confuse a beginner.

Nevertheless, this book is tremendously useful. The section on general husbandry is thorough and, generally speaking, leaves very little unsaid. In tone and style the book is more appropriate for adult beginners than for children, but even experienced keepers will find Mattison’s refreshing perspective of value. It’s worth having, even if you own the previous edition.

Note: This article has not been updated since its first publication. As a result, some of the facts referred to in the text may now be out of date.