Moving house changes a ball python's paperwork more than its routine. The snake still needs the same warm hide, the same prey, and the same quiet — but every address, vet, and emergency arrangement written around it now points at a home it no longer lives in. Work through the records in the order someone would actually need them in a problem week.
Vet registration and transferred history
Register with a vet near the new home who genuinely treats reptiles, and do it in the first weeks rather than during an emergency. Ask your previous practice to transfer the history: visit notes, any parasite or respiratory treatment, weight records, and known quirks such as a history of fasting or difficult sheds.
Update the address and phone number held by the old practice, any insurance or care-plan account if you have one, and any microchip registry entry if your python is chipped. Then check the transferred file arrived complete. Ball pythons are long-lived and change vets several times; a gap in the record at this move is the gap a vet trips over years later.
Contact details on profiles, plans, and people
Update your own address and contact details anywhere they protect the snake: the emergency contact sheet by the enclosure, the sitter instructions if a neighbour or friend feeds during holidays, and any lost-pet or identification profile information that carries your phone number. A ball python that escapes in a new house, or is found by a neighbour who does not know you yet, is reunited through current details or not at all.
Tell the people on your emergency plan that the address has changed, and revise the plan itself if your old backup person is no longer nearby. Recruit the new backup — a local friend, neighbour, or keeper — and give them the updated sheet rather than assuming the old arrangement stretches across town.
New-home rules, services, and supplies paperwork
Check the paperwork of the new home itself: tenancy or building rules about keeping reptiles, any local licence or registration requirement that differs from your old area, and the details of your new nearest reptile supplier for feeders and equipment. Keep receipts and any updated agreements in the same file as the snake's records, so a landlord question is answered with documents, not debate.
Finally, review the care notes as a stranger would read them at the new address: enclosure temperatures, feeding day and prey size, last shed, and last feed all still current? Moving week often interrupts feeding, and noting the pause and the date feeding resumed turns a future refusal into a readable story instead of a mystery.
Also update the practical access notes that sit with the paperwork: who now holds a spare key, where the carrier is stored in the new home, and which neighbour has been introduced to the fact that a harmless ball python lives next door. In a new street, that introduction is paperwork of a human kind — if the snake is ever found in a garden, a neighbour who already has your number makes one calm phone call instead of a frightened report. Note the date you made those introductions and gave out the updated emergency sheet, so the file shows the plan was rebuilt, not just reprinted with a new address line.
Once the updates are done, store the current versions together in KinsLe using Pet Passport, so your ball python's new address, new vet, and full history sit in one packet that matches the home it actually lives in.