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Some thoughts on deciding to euthanize poor feeders

I understand where you are coming from. Tube feeding and force feeding is where I draw the line, but I know it can be successful.
IMO We can only improve the gene pool by choosing babies with strong feeding responses to breed and sell, and avoid proliferating the ones that are fussy about what and how they eat. Not that there is anything physically wrong with those? And in the case of rare genes sometimes there is little choice but to take that picky eater and try to outcross into stronger lines.

I have been questioning what I would have done if it had been the hypo cinders that I hatched. I hope I would have the integrity to be able to put them down if I had to, but I don't know it was my dream morph that I was waiting for all this time. Luckily they are both taking f/t.
 
I partially agree, but I hope you are not indicating that I don't have integrity because I would prefer to tube feed a snake I want to keep over killing it. That would be illogical. I would do it just based on the fact that I know the snake is actually healthy and is reacting the way it would in the wild, not that it is an unhealthy snake - it's just not doing something that I deem it should do based on what we humans want it to do.
Now if the snake were not eating because it was born unhealthy, especially from multiple generations of inbreeding (I am not an advocate of inbreeding at all) then I would euthanize it without a second thought.
On the other hand, for example, I have a set of snakes right now from Kathy love that are out of two totally unrelated WC snakes and REFUSE to eat mice at this moment in time, all because it isn't natural for them to do so... not because they are unhealthy. NOT putting them down would NOT mean that I don't have integrity.
 
No didn't mean that at all... I meant the integrity as in being able to stick to my own standards when it came to a morph I really was shooting for. Not trying to impose those onto any other person than me. I think it is up to each breeder to decide what is right for them (and not to expect all other breeders to see it the same way - to each his own as you said)
 
Ah, gotcha. Thanks for that Jen. It is true that we all have our own standards and we all judge our cases a little bit differently. Thank God for that!! :)

Note: just like I do not prefer to inbreed, but many other breeders that I've talked to don't see a problem with inbreeding multiple generations.
 
I agree with with the mercy death. My first corn snake was a snow that I got from the pet store and he never ate for me. I tired everything to get him to eat and nothing worked. I found him dead on Christmas after a month of owning him. The pet store said that he ate and they couldn't get him to eat at all when I brought him up there the first week to see him eat. Granted I dealt with a pet store, still if they are not going to eat it's best to euthanize them and prevent them from starving to death. I personally wouldn't want a picky eater passing genes off. I'm already dealing with an anery hatchling that was sold to me as a feeder and I went through hell to finally figure out he would only eat in his cage and not in a feeding tank. He was sold to me as a breeder. I will not be breeding him after finding out he is a picky eater.
 
Well I found the last little cinder dead today. I never did euthanize him due to some of the responses of this thread. I got him to eat a couple of times more and was going to offer him a home free to someone local that was interested in him. But now I really wish I had just euthanized him when I first posted this thread. I believe even more strongly than ever now that it can be much more unkind to try and get something to live than it is to put it down before it has to suffer. RIP little one, I'm sorry I did this to you.
 
ghosthousecorns said:
Well I found the last little cinder dead today. I never did euthanize him due to some of the responses of this thread. I got him to eat a couple of times more and was going to offer him a home free to someone local that was interested in him. But now I really wish I had just euthanized him when I first posted this thread. I believe even more strongly than ever now that it can be much more unkind to try and get something to live than it is to put it down before it has to suffer. RIP little one, I'm sorry I did this to you.
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Sorry to hear that.
 
I'm sorry to hear that!
It's a really hard choice to make, sometimes it's for the best and sometimes not. You just have to make the best choice you can at the time and realize that you will probably be wrong sometime. But as long as you did the best you could, it's not your fault.
 
This year I had given up on a non-feeder and tried to feed it to my king but the king refused?! A couple of days later I received a mail from a lady that wanted to have some of my bad and picky feeders (I advertised them with a low price tag), because she gives home to disabled and other extra need animals. She choose a.o. the one I had given up but that was not fed a couple of days earlier. I have not heard from her so far but I felt this non-feeder was meant to have a nice life as a pet with that lovely female :)
 
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