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Live feed question

wycherley

wycherley

Batman Rules
Hello

I live in England and its against the law to feed live, so i obviously feed frozen. What i'm trying to work out is, when you guys who feed live have the snake refuse to eat what do you do with the mouse? Because i just flush mine and give him the burial at sea but i cant think what you guys do?:shrugs:
 
It's against the law? I don't think I've ever heard of that. :S I've never fed live (nor would I), but I know some people that do and they have a tank of mice set up... they just put the mouse back in with the others. It's a live mouse, so it's still good next time.
Frozen mice unfortunately aren't good to refreeze. :S So yea, unless you have another snake to give it to, it's pretty much a funeral at sea for them. :S
 
For anyone that doesn't eat their live food (and at this point, it's only the '08s pinkies), the food goes to another willing party. My kingsnake is ALWAYS happy to clean up some pinkies, and I even have a couple larger corns that don't mind having a pinky dessert every now and then.
 
It's against the law? I don't think I've ever heard of that.
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I think it's a bit of a grey legal area, especially since the recent Animal Welfare Act.

Before that, if prosecuted, your defence would have been that the snake would have died without eating live mice. However, there was never a test case through the courts, so the principle was never actually tested and there's no legal precedent. There wasn't a law against it specifically, but neither had it been proven to be allowed by law.

Since the Animal Welfare Act, I'd see the law as granting equal status to both the mouse and snake in terms of welfare and unnecessary suffering. Quite where that would leave a court case, I don't know. Theoretically you could end up getting prosecuted for both - a) cruelty to the mouse by feeding it to something else whilst alive (unnecessary suffering) and b) cruelty to the snake for not feeding it what it needed (unnecessary suffering). The AR lobby managed to get a lot of Animal Rights stuff included in the bundle, and most of it is open to interpretation.

Again, there's not been a court case yet, so the law hasn't been clarified.

Bottom line - if you feed live, don't make a big thing of it and nobody will know. Also, don't draw attention to it by buying your mice in the same shop all the time.
 
I don't feed live but I fresh kill mine. I got in the habit when I needed to feed rabbits to the larger pythons and there's nothing worse than a regurged 7 lb rabbit because it wasn't thawed all the way through, or the stench of a 7 lb rabbit carcass defrosting in my home.Plus it is a lot more convienient to not have to defrost. Occasionally I have one left that I killed and then I will freeze it as not to waste one. For the mice/rats I use a spoon,put it on top of the head and pull the tail up to snap the spine. its quick and supposedly humane. For the bigger prey I use co2, I am in the process of building another chamber so when I feed the bigger animals I use a buddys setup since they only eat every 2-3 weeks.Once I have my own co2 setup again I will use it on all the prey items.
 
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