I've been keeping a good percentage of my life, and have seen, and gone through, burnout. Burnout is what happens when it all gets to be too much--to much cage cleaning, too much worrying about this animal being too humid and this one not humid enough. In extremes, worrying about how you'll afford to feed them. Too much worry to have any fun, to appreciate the animals.

For people just getting started, let me caution you against getting too many animals. That may sound a bit funny coming from a guy with nearly 40 herps right now (and a lot more in baby season!) but it is important to note that I've developed this slowly.

There's two ways to get overburdened, and have herps go from joy to chore. You can either get too many species, or just too many individuals (you can do both too--whooo boy).

Everyone's got a limit of h ow many herps they can care for well, and how many herps they enjoy caring for. That number isn't constant--it changes person to person and depending on their circumstances. It also changes depending on the animal--a florida kingsnake isn't nearly the same amount of time, money, space and occasionally blood as a reticulated python for instance.

There really isn't an exact way to know what your limit is--so while you're building your collection take it slowly. Don't go from 1 ball python to 40 in 3 months.

And, I'd caution against getting tons of babies (of any species) before you have one or two adults and know what that workload is like--I nearly did that with the reticulated pythons, because even at a smallish 10' or so they weren't that awful hard or expensive...but I backed out and it is good I did, because at 15'? Way different, and I couldn't manage 10 of them.



You can also, and perhaps less intuitively, burn yourself out by getting too diverse. There are hundreds of species available at least semi-regularly in the pet trade, and many of them are interesting--I've never seen a snake I didn't like at least a little.

But, they need different care. And take it from me, trying to care for a wandering garter in the same room as your reticulated pythons can be awkward since they need widely different ambient temps and humidity and diet. Trying to breed something like mountain racers (cool, somewhat humid) in the same facility as a rosy boa (dry, warm) will result in complications--if your species all need similar care, it's just easier to manage it. If all you do is truly tropical snakes, you can heat the whole building to 80 F and run a humidifier and that makes managing the cage temps a ton easier. One of the worst mistakes I made as a herpetoculturist was when I was a kid, I wanted to have a good diversity--so many pretty animals right? But that shot me in the foot fairly quickly. It's a lot easier to handle 40 animals of one or two species than 40 animals of 20 species.

It isnt impossible to manage care for widely diverse species of course, but it is more work. It's something to consider.

so take it slow, have fun and don't overload yourself. Keeping herps is a hobby, so enjoy it!