How big is too big?????

[bfckarlos]

Will a snake tell you if it's not ready to move up to bigger feeds?

I am trying to move one of my snakes up to small mice, she regularly takes two fuzzies no problem about every two weeks. I've been trying to move her up to a single small mouse but she just ignores it. I think she is ready and big enough to take it, but won't. I she just saying it's too big?? :shrugs:

She is a Baird's Ratsnake about 16 months old, and a good two foot long.

[BlueDemon]

Well, from what I've read, you don't want to feed your snake anything that is more than 1 1/2 times the smallest part of your snake (excluding everything after the stomach).

So, I suppose you should judge it by that. And if all that is within normal limits, then I'd say the snake is just not used to that larger prey, yet.

Blue

[dionythicus]

I've noticed that my ratsnakes (of various species) prefer smaller meals, e.g. two or three fuzzies vs a hopper. My corns move up to larger food item per meal twice as fast as the rats. I don't know what's so different about their natures, but I've seen that way it in all my rats and corns.

[ghosthousecorns]

Can you get hoppers? It might be a big switch from fuzzies to small mice, maybe an intermediate size would help

[bfckarlos]

Thanks for all the replies guys, but my other smaller Ratsnake ate up the small mouse the first didn't want, so there are not too big afterall, but maybe she's (the first one) just being picky.

[bfckarlos]

Ok so i've tried again to feed my bigger snake a small mouse, but shes not interested as yet. She only had 1 fuzzy end last week (and had nothing before that for a month) so I decided to try again with a small one.
Anyway no luck, so for the moment I will have to keep her on fuzzies, but at least smaller one is taking small mice now, so that's an improvement.

[kr0316]

No one has hoppers where I live just fuzzies, adults, and rats. So what I did was feed my corns until they eat 2 or more big fuzzies then I moved to small adults. One of my corns eats pinky rats but the other won't eat rats at all so I stuck with adult mice. They both are about 3 feet.