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.

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