Should Feeding Live Prey be Avoided?

Just keep them sealed in the freezer. The coldness helps to kill germs. Feeding live can be dangerous when he has to try to eat a larger one that could bite him. Try to switch to frozen/thawed ASAP. You don;t have to kill them. Order online or go to the local pet store.

Here is something I'd like to throw in, and it has been puzzling me. Everyone says buying frozen is cheaper, but what if you don't have the freezer space. Has anyone ever broke down the actual cost between frozen and breeding your own feeders( don't count start up).

In the way of "success" stories with live feed:

I have had 10 snakes in the past 1.5 years, and still currently have nine (one escapee, still looking and hoping ), and I have so far used nothing but live feed, everything from pinks to adult mice to rat pinks to rat pups and fuzzies. Nothing has ever hurt my snakes, but I always stay there and watch, just in case. And with nine snakes, that can take a while.

A guy I know breeds mice and rats for his stock (pet store owner/breeder), so I usually just get a bunch from him. Costs around US$5 for food for all snakes.

The main reason I never tried F/T was because I didn't want to go through trying to convince my snakes to eat a different food. Live is working, all are happily eating.

For those with horror stories with LF, were the snakes being watched during feeding? Or were they unattended?

So as far as a success story, this is a bit weak...I'm quite inexperienced, as I've only dealt with 10 snakes over a year and a half, and even I'm considering F/T feed...I don't want my snakes to get hurt when I could have done something to prevent it.

I feed my little snakes pinkies that I have just bought and put into the freezer to kill them. After and hour, I pull them out and warm them up with hot water (The pinkies are inside a sandwich bag). I have had pinkies return from their frozen death and live again, even after 45 minutes of freezing, so an hour is minimum for my freezer.

For the Big Boys and Girls, they get nice, warm, freshly stunned/killed mice. I'll take the mice, one by one, by the tail and smack them against the side of the cage. Then I lay them on a plate, so my snake won't get any substrate. The mice will kick for a while and then lay very still. Sometimes, if the snake is slow to eat all the mice (I give the adults two adult mice every other week--14 days), the second mouse will 'come to' and I'll have to pop it again.

Horrible and cruel, I know, but my wife doesn't want a freezer full of rodents. Short term is okay, like an hour, or so, but not continuous.

In response to the space question - if you don't have a lot of freezer space, don't buy a lot of frozen mice. A tray of 50 pinkies hardly takes up any space, but larger mice (or more mice) will, of course, take up more room. But buying F/T doesn't mean you have to buy in bulk. You can order online or go to a pet store and buy exactly the amount you want. I tend to get a dozen at a time. An adult needs only 3 jumbo mice per month, so this lasts for four months. You'll go through pinkies a lot faster, even with just one snake, but as I said, they take up less space anyway.

K

While I was reading your post Gregg the song, "little bunny foo foo hopping through the forest scooping up the field mice and bopping them on the head" started running through my head...
I must say that I am way to sqwirmish to freeze and stun my mice,... I have to watch the Lion King everynow and then to remind myself that it's all just the circle of life

I know what you mean. I like to think of myself as a pacifist. I don't like to hurt anything. I reached a point, however, where I had to do something else besides putting mice into the freezer. Adult mice will take FOREVER to pass away in the icebox.

Then, a herp friend of mine in LA (that's Los Angeles, not Lower Alabama), showed me what she did. At first, I couldn't do it, but she made it look simple enough and assured me that it was (probably) painless for the mice. All I had to do was do it hard enough to not torture them.

Let me tell you. The first time I did it, I felt like I should have been arrested for murder right there on the spot. Man, it was hard to do. Even now, whenever I do it I feel terrible. Poor mice. But, I used to put mice in the cage alive and I changed my mind when one of my snakes snagged it on the side near the rear and the mouse whipped around and bit the snake right on the head. A little more and the mouse would have reached the snake's eye.

Circle of Life? Yeah, one of these days Something's gonna come along and grab ME by the tail and smack MY head up against something. We are all part of The Great Circle of Life. Nevertheless, If we are going to keep, raise, and breed carnivores in captivity, then we are going to have to become carnivores for them, if they are to eat.

One of these days, I'll have enough cornsnakes to make buying everything I need frozen, and in bulk, worth it; but for now, it's easier to get what I need and only what I need for the snakes I have.

Today is feeding day for the whole group. I know "Little Bunny Foo Foo" is going to be swimming through my brain, now that you've mentioned it.

hi. i have a 00 snow that i bought at a local pet store about 4 months ago. it had been a pet that someone decided they didnt want when it started to grow. he has 4 mouse scars on different parts of his body. the scars are quite small but still unsightly. i've also noticed that when he sheds, the skin around the scarring does not detach as easily as the rest. in most cases the mouse cannot truly cause major harm to a snake but the little occasional nip will still cause scarring so i now feed f/t. just my humble opinion..... jim

I would just like to say that the norm over here is to feed defrost whenever possible - I would guess that 90% of snakes are fed defrost here.

The only time I personally would feed either freshly killed or even live (illegal here by the way) is if I had a stubborn snake that refused to feed at all.

Just for the record - Over the years I have bred and used literally thousands of mice. Large numbers are killed using carbon dioxide
ie the live mice are placed in an airtight bag and carbon dioxide added to the bag, which is then sealed up causing a quick death with no mess.

For smaller numbers of mice, an ideal way is to take an clean empty tin can (baked beans or similar). Hold the mouse by the tail on top of something solid eg a paving slab. hold the can in your rright hand, placing the open end over the mouses neck and quickly lean onto the can pushing down quickly to disslocate the mouses neck, thus killing it instantly.

Sorry to be so gruesome,

But

Like you say

It's the circle of life

Andy

oh yea, I won't have any nightmares tonight, no way.