• Hello!

    Either you have not registered on this site yet, or you are registered but have not logged in. In either case, you will not be able to use the full functionality of this site until you have registered, and then logged in after your registration has been approved.

    Registration is FREE, so please register so you can participate instead of remaining a lurker....

    Please be certain that the location field is correctly filled out when you register. All registrations that appear to be bogus will be rejected. Which means that if your location field does NOT match the actual location of your registration IP address, then your registration will be rejected.

    Sorry about the strictness of this requirement, but it is necessary to block spammers and scammers at the door as much as possible.

frozen vs live

J

Jokerswild112

New member
I have raised my corn snake on frozen mice he used to go for them like lightning but as hes gotten bigger its been a challenge to get him to eat the frozen mice it usually takes a whole day. Yesturday was feeding time and they were out of frozen mice so i decided to take a gamble and feed him a live dwarf hampster and he loved it he was so fast the hampster didnt have any time to defend itself and he gobbled it down within minutes. Does this mean my snake would prefer to be fed live pray?
 
I've heard that hampsters, are among one of the rodents that are like crack to snakes.....however..if your snake decides it won't eat anything except hampsters (f/t or live) you could have trouble with keeping up with supplies of them to feed your snake.

Feeding live is dangerous to your snake. The prey can fight back & even if it's a split second before the snake gets the prey, your snake could end up seriously injured, losing an eye, infection,or even death.
 
For the safety of your snake, and the sake of the hamster, do NOT feed them live. Hamsters, especially dwarfs, are amazingly vicious and a SERIOUS threat to your snake.

Feeding live is not something anyone should do, especially if the snake already takes f/t. Once the snake starts feeding on something that can bite back, you run the very real risk of your snake being injured. These injuries can and do get infected and sometimes ends up killing the snake.

Being killed by a snake is also very painful for the feeder animal, it is not painless and it is not quick. Not to mention hamsters are not nutritionally what you want as a staple for your snake.

Try freshly killed maybe? A lot of snakes take that well if not better than f/t.
 
Just a question, how large is your snake now and how often and how much do you feed him? As a snake matures, their requirements aren't the same as when they were small and growing in leaps and bounds. Maybe you might want to increase the time between feedings, say from every 7 days to every 10 days, to see if that improves your snake's eagerness to eat the F/T.
 
i agree with everything everyone else said, but another huge advantage of frozen is simply convenience. but i would say the health and safety of your snake is the most important. there is no point in repeating what the others have said, but as long as your snake does eat, i wouldnt worry about it.
 
I was going to ask the same thing as Susan.

Because on a personal note, I have one male I have been trying to feed every 10 days to bulk him up for next breeding season and he will refuse almost every time. But wait 14 days and he will eat. So he is on his 14 day cycle and he will be as big as he gets before brumation time. If he isn't big enough...well I guess he will have to wait.
 
This thread has a lot of questions that could be answered by going through the previously made threads first. Just to help keep things cleaned up and organized. I def recommend reading previous threads about f/t vs live as well as feeding plans if needed.

Also, if it is taking your snake the entire day just to swallow the prey it sounds much too large. If it is just slow to feed, then that is normal, some snakes just dont get THAT excited about their food.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top