A snake
trap is a device used to, one way or another,
entrap a
snake.
I lost a pet snake in my house once so I wound up doing some quick
research as to how they work. There are two
basic types I could find.
The first and most common is a
glue-based trap by SnakeGuard. It is a flat
box, about two feet long, half a foot deep and a few inches tall with holes on either end. Its inside is lined with a special glue, and the snake gets stuck on it once it enters. Given the
slithering way a snake typically moves, it winds up getting more and more
stuck as it tries to free itself. The snake can be
freed later by moving the trap to a safe release area, disassembling the trap and pouring lots of
vegetable cooking oil on the snake and the
surrounding glue. In about an
hour, it can slither away,
safe and sound.
(some info stolen from snakeguard.com)
I really wasn’t very
thrilled about using this type of trap on a pet snake that wasn’t mine. Plus this
fiasco happened to occur near the
weekend, and I’d be unable to order one via mail. I wound up using this type….
The second type is a
box type trap. This is just a
ventilated box with a big hole in it. Fit a
funnel on the inside of the box (same size as the hole, with the pointy end of the funnel pointing into the box), and you are done. The ones I saw on the
web were made out of tightly
meshed chicken wire, but same idea. The snake crawls in through the funnel, falls into the box and can’t get back out the hole. The hole should probably be
angled a certain way or have a one-way
door on it so the snake
definitely can’t get back out.
A
roommate and I built three of these out of merely
monitor boxes, cardboard, some
screen and lots of
tape.
Did they work, you ask? The snake was hanging out in our couch the whole time it was loose, so we don’t know if they would’ve worked or not. But they were
fun to build.
I’ll also mention that there is some snake
attractant out there (commonly marketed as “snake lure”) for trapping
game snakes. But according to a guy at a hunting store it’s effectiveness on house snakes is unknown. I used live mice in my traps, concealed in a hole-punched
Tupperware.