My first BP, I need a bit of help!

[Syn]

Well after being redirected here for some help, I hope you all have the patience of listening to what has been going on!

I just recently acquired a 3 year old female Ball Python.

The previous owners had to get rid of her due to a pending divorce, and during the time they had her (since she was 6 months old) she was recovering from eating far too much in her first 6 months. She has finally gotten back down to a decent weight.

Now here is my predicament.

She only eats lives, so I've been told, and I have no experience with any of my reptiles eating live anything..

I'm off to the store later today and I was curious if anyone has tips!

Thanks everyone!

Here she is!

[Spaniard]

Welcome to the Site

The same size guidelines go for feeding live as any other method. One prey item as thick as the thickest part of your snake or 10-15% of the snakes body weight. You'll want to make sure that you're buying your live prey from somewhere decent. A hungry rodent can put up more of a fight than one thats been taken care of properly and possibly hurt your snake.

You'll want to make sure to supervise the feeding, usually my snakes strike and coil within the first minute I put the mouse in. Anything longer than 10-15 minutes and I remove the mouse and try again next week.

[Syn]

Thank you for the welcome Spaniard.

Well, she hasn't been fed for a month, so I've been told. They old owners said they fed her once monthly... As for finding someplace decent, that will be the hardest part of the feeding. They all have great f/t mice but not so great live.

[kc261]

Welcome!

The story you were given of your BP's previous life sounds unlikely. BP's don't tend to overeat; they'd rather go on a fast. So the possibility of this snake having eaten SO much in its first 6 months of life that it needed to spend the next 2 1/2 yrs recovering is unlikely at best.

In any event, that is the past now, and as long as she gets proper care from now on it is unlikely to matter. From the pic, she seems at least reasonably healthy, so I would feed her like any other BP, and Rich (spaniard) already gave you good advice on that. I will just add that most people feed every 7-10 days (5-7 for young ones, but not 3 yr olds).

I'd recommend finding out what her weight is, so you can track her growth.

Petco has decent mice, at least the locations around here do.

[Syn]

From what I was told the girl at about 6 times a month, mice that were a bit too large, and were very fatty.. But yes I have heard BPs are very lethargic.

The closest petco is about 30 minutes away, but I will check. Do they offer live mice? No one locally offer them alive unless they are pets. (And cost quite as much in that case)

I have a scale that weighs up to 600g.. but I'm pretty sure she's over that already, not to mention the scale is quite a bit small for her.

Any scale suggestions?

[kc261]

Yes, Petco sells live mice, and no, they don't care if you want them for feeders and don't charge inflated "pet" prices.

My digital scale is a kitchen scale I got at Walmart using their "site to store" free shipping. They no longer have the same one available. I had previously bought the one my local walmart had in stock, but the tare function on that one did not work properly. That is where you set a bowl or something on it, then zero it, so you can get the weight of what you put in the bowl, and it is obviously very useful, so to me the scale was worthless when it didn't work. When I was testing it, I'd weigh something as 45g, for example, then put a bowl on the scale, tare it, put the item in, and it would tell me it weighed 15g. Waaayyy too much difference to be acceptable. So that is something to look out for! The new one (different brand) works fine.

A lot of people recommend this one:
http://reptilebasics.com/My-Weigh-70...l-p-16191.html

[Syn]

Thanks for the suggestions!

I will definitely be stopping by petco today.

Will have to save up for that scale though, just paid bills! Errugh.

[Syn]

Well I went to petco last night.

Got some crickets and a medium sized rat. There was no pricetag on the rat and it was opened of all things.

I asked the lady, why does it smell like bad ketchup?
"The break room is right there" *points behind herself*
"Oh... why is it opened?"
"By mistake. I'll take a dollar off for that."
"Well how much is it..?"
"I don't know."

Oh and before that she goes and talks about how the rat should only be as big as the space between the snake's eyes... wrong animal idiot!!

She also said I could put a rubber band around the live mouse's mouth so it wouldn't bite my snake.. I opted out and told her I'd try a f/t rat first.
(not to mention rubber bands don't digest, right?)

Upon getting crickets, half of them are chirping and too large. They said that's all they had.

The idiots charged me 18c a cricket (petsmart only charges 11!!) I think something messed up there.

So I've been listening to chirping since last night.. didn't sleep, the crickets were too big for the leos to eat but the chameleons and bearded enjoyed them.. but didn't eat the damn chirpers.. but back to the rat.

Rat gets ringed up, oh look, the rat is something like, 7.99 or 6.99. Much more than a live rat! I smell my hand and it smells like rotting ketchup. Guess it wasn't the break room you stupid BLEEP.

I'm not going to feed that rat to my snake so I tell them I want a refund, the kid that's at the register ignores me and I say it again, he says, oh you'd have to talk to the manager and she's not here.

So I left, 12$ short of what I was before.

Wow petco isnt as great as some people say they are. Bleh!!

[Spaniard]

Petco's like all other large corporate locations are only as good as the regional and store managers make them, as well as the caliber of employees at a given store. The petcos in my area are pretty decent at their reptile care and their live feeders are usually good as well. Sorry about your experience, if the rat smelled foul it most likely was defrosted and then refrozen again. Which would explain why the bag was already open.

[Syn]

Yeah it was a very foul and odd smell, rotten ketchup was the only thing I could think of to describe it.

Would you recommend feeding it to her or throwing it away?

All of the petsmarts and petcos around here are rubbish.

I've been out of state to others that were great but.. just not around here.