The default most keepers land on: feed at home
Start from the snake's experience of the two options. A snake that can smell prey is already switched on — alert, focused, primed to strike at warm movement. That is precisely the moment tub feeding asks you to pick it up and carry it somewhere else, and it is when most feeding bites happen. Enclosure feeding skips the whole transaction: the snake stays on familiar ground, eats in the territory where it feels secure, and is then left completely alone to digest. The second half of that matters more than it sounds, because the other classic tub problem waits at the end of the meal — a snake lifted and moved with a full stomach is a snake at real risk of bringing the meal back up. Fed at home, nothing has to be moved at all.
What the separate tub genuinely offers
The tub is not without honest arguments. Prey dragged around a loose substrate comes back coated in it, and feeding in a bare tub removes that worry entirely — though feeding over a flat slate or plate inside the enclosure solves the same problem without the move. A tub also lets you watch intake closely, which has some value with a new or problem feeder. And a minority of individual snakes simply refuse to eat in their enclosures yet take prey calmly in a plain tub; an individual animal's settled preference is real data, and it outranks any general rule, this one included. Weighed against those points are the move itself, twice, with a food-aroused snake going out and a full one coming back.
The aggression myth, examined
The claim that usually tips people toward tubs is that feeding in the enclosure teaches the snake to expect food every time the door opens, making it strike at hands. Keeper experience has not been kind to that idea. Snakes are cue learners: they read the pattern around an event far more than its location. A consistent feeding signal — prey always arriving on tongs, a gentle tap or touch with a hook before feeding, hands entering at other times for water and cleaning without any food smell in the room — teaches the difference between feeding time and handling time far more reliably than a change of scenery does. The tub was never the lesson; the routine is. Wash your hands before reaching in, whatever you feed, so you never smell like the menu.
Making your choice work, whichever it is
If your snake eats calmly in its enclosure, the practical evidence says let it, and build the routine that keeps it calm: same tongs, same tap signal, a consistent time, prey offered rather than dropped loose where the setup allows. If it refuses three straight in-enclosure offerings yet eats readily in a tub, accept the verdict of the only vote that counts and feed it in the tub — gently, and leaving it undisturbed for a while before the return trip. Under either system, the rule that never changes is the quiet period afterwards: no handling for a couple of days after a meal, so digestion is never interrupted by being carried about.
Once the decision is made, putting it in KinsLe's Family Sharing — enclosure feeding, tap first, tongs always — stops a second keeper in the house from quietly running the opposite system and confusing the snake's routine.