Seymour ate! After all the striking, constricting, and abandoning we've been seeing, we finally picked up a little live mouse and gave it to him. He watched it for a few minutes, waiting for it to get in a good position, then he killed it neatly and ate it headfirst (you'd think I wouldn't have to mention that, but Hanover goes for the belly first and then finds the head).

We tried to follow it up with a frozen/thawed while the feeding response was in gear (after the last upright gulp) and he did strike and constrict, but abandoned it just like the other f/t we've tried. Obviously he is not happy with f/t, and we don't want him losing his good muscle tone and weight.

So here's the plan: we'll be feeding him live and trying to follow with f/t for the next month or so, and see if that works to get him switched over. If either of us had the stomach for it, we'd try stunned or fresh-killed, but I don't think we can do that. I got told that holding the mouse by its tail was too mean, fer cryin out loud.

Also, while we were at Petco picking up meece, we chatted with the employee I mentioned before who has a number of snakes, and she mentioned that people often drop off bp's at their store when they don't want them anymore. We gave her a card and told her to call us if they get one in, and she said she'd do that and pass the card along to the reptiles manager as well. The response was good enough that we were thinking we'd drop off cards at a few more local pet stores. We can start our own small-scale bp rescue.