How do you feed live mice / rats?

[Caspian]

I know this seems cruel or whatever, but somebody I knew breeds their own feeder rats. For some reason these rats were all very aggressive; one of her ball pythons were killed by one.

So before she fed the rats to the snakes, she would get a really big knife and sort of bash the teeth out of the rodent.

I wouldn't recommend this for anyone else though lol

This is in no way responsible animal care, toward the rats OR the snakes. It is nothing more than base and contemptible cruel sadism. If the rat was able to attack and kill her snake, it was through her own negligence. There is no excuse whatsoever for torturing any animal in such a manner. It certainly is not grounds for laughter under any circumstances. Any live feeding should be supervised, so that if there is a problem the feeder animal can be removed immediately.

[Rob]

Wow and I thought the "flick club" was bad.


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[Slim]

I wouldn't recommend this for anyone else though lol

I just hope there isn't a YouTube video...

[PythonBabes]

Yeah, I'd told her many many times just to supervise, so that if anything does go wrong she can intervene and stop the snake from being injured in any way.

I don't talk to her anymore but when I told her to just supervise the animals she would get all pissy at me and talk about how it's nature. A mouse doesn't get its teeth bashed out before its eaten in the wild.

[cchardwick]

Dang, that's brutal! When I was growing up about 20 years ago there was a pet store owner that would grab the rat by the tail and smash him against the corner of the wall to kill it before feeding. I recently saw an article about a lawsuit about the very same thing and the long arm of the law confiscated all of the snakes from the pet store! CO2 is the only way to go and not very expensive either.

i think once the mouse or rat realizes it's food and gets aggressive you have to put it down with CO2 to feed it off.

[For Goodness Snakes]

First of all I would recommend that you never start ball pythons on mice, If you plan on breeding the female ball pythons then rats are the only way to go. Place the live rat in with the snake for no more than 10 minutes, if the snake does not eat the rat within that 10 minutes remove the rat and feed it to another snake or take it back to it's cage to continue growing. Some breeders including myself will place a couple of pieces of dog food in the snakes cage while the rat is in the cage with the snake. I also place a small blue paper clip on each cage that has a rat in it, this allows me to know which tub had a rat in it.

If you produce your own rats you'll need a larger snake such as a boa or Burmese python to feed the retired rats to, they are too big for most ball pythons.

If you have more questions about this subject or others feel free to call me at 408-981-6694, If I can't answer your question I'll find someone that can.

Happy Feeding

Brian Gundy
For Goodness Snakes