For convenience live or frozen/thawed?

For those of you that have 10 or more snakes what do you find more convenient, to feed live or frozen/thawed?
If you could please explain. If you do feed frozen/thawed what is your process?

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Originally Posted by Driver

For those of you that have 10 or more snakes what do you find more convenient, to feed live or frozen/thawed?
If you could please explain. If you do feed frozen/thawed what is your process?

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I don't at the moment but I did have 10 snakes at one point. I found that feeding live was a real hassle. Here's a little pro vs. con chart for feeding live for ya.

Pro Live:

- No waste, rats that are not eaten can be saved for next feeding.
- I found i got a better feeding response when feeding live but that could just be my personal experience.
- No thawing or prep time required
- umm...

Con Live:

- Trips every week or more to your local rat source
- Smelly
- "Can," hurt the snake... can..
- Takes up more space than F/T
- Not always available.. and prices can be higher than F/T especially since you can buy F/T in bulk and save some money.
- If you do have to keep them for a week or more you will need to house them, feed them, water them, etc. It becomes more and more expensive.

Here's an example of my situation right now. I bought a medium rat for my biggest BP. The rat was too big for all the other snakes so it sat in the bin. It went 5 weeks without eating and now the rat is in the middle ground of the large classification and way too big for the BP. Now I have a rat and nothing to feed it to. I can sell it, but its already cost me like $5-$10 in food and bedding.

I like feeding live and I still do it only because some of my BP's are irregular feeders and/or won't switch off of live asf. If I had it my way they would all be on F/T.

Hope you can make some sense out of my ramblings.

I prefer prekilled.
I have a few small breeding colonies of rodents and instead of feeding live I feed p/k when I have those really picky snakes.
Otherwise I do f/t which I find kind of a hassle for me feeding 20 snakes every week. If I bred enough rodents I would do p/k for all of them.

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Originally Posted by decensored

Pro Live:

- No waste, rats that are not eaten can be saved for next feeding.
- I found i got a better feeding response when feeding live but that could just be my personal experience.
- No thawing or prep time required
- umm...

Con Live:

- Trips every week or more to your local rat source
- Smelly
- "Can," hurt the snake... can..
- Takes up more space than F/T
- Not always available.. and prices can be higher than F/T especially since you can buy F/T in bulk and save some money.
- If you do have to keep them for a week or more you will need to house them, feed them, water them, etc. It becomes more and more expensive.

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I am currently breeding my own colonies. Most of the cons really wont effect me that much. Im just trying to figure out what I want to do in the long run.

F/T is more convenient if you breed your own rats. That way you don't have to worry about the rats growing to large for you snakes (I only have two.) Captain Hook will eat anything, F/T live pre-killed she don't care what it is. If I can get Ivan on F/T I will do them all this way, let them grow to a certain size then kill and freeze them. I may keep a few to sell to pay for food/bedding but F/T is more convenient if you breed your own unless you have a lot of snakes.

I find FT more convenient for my # of snakes, in the sense that if I raised my own feeders, I would spend more time total focusing on feeding. If I had to go to the pet store to buy feeders, that'd the the MOST inconvenient.

There is a base time cost for raising rats. If I had to average producing 10 baby rats a week, compared to needing to average 100 baby rats a week, I'd spend less time per rat for the latter, so the more feeders you need, the more that raising your own feeders becomes a viable alternative if you're focusing on total time out of your week spent on feeding issues.

There are other pros and cons to feeding live and raising your own feeders, but I feel that at 10-30 snakes, I'm going to feed f/t. Above that I'd probably raise my own, but definitely not before if I only cared about convenience.

I was thinking I'd raise my own about a month ago, just because I wanted to know exactly what my feeders were raised on and how healthy they are before they get fed to my snakes. I'm putting off that decision until spring rolls by.

We breed our own rats, asf and mice. In general live is far more convenient for us. All of our balls and adult corns eat live rats and asf. Our amazon tree boa will eat anything as long as its alive, she doesn't care. Our smaller corns get f/t mice and rats.

oops sorry i didnt read the post of 10 or more but I would feed live if i did. I would just breed the little buggers and sex them so they wouldnt breed all the time I value my freezer space. :P

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Originally Posted by Ogre

I value my freezer space. :P

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Awe, c'mon. Everyone loves digging through hundreds of dead rats trying to find something to make for dinner.

lol exactly. I only have one bp and she so far has only taken f/t once and I was getting particularly frustrated that she wouldnt eat so I switched to live and wala she ate. My fiance is determend to get her back on f/t agian and I just dont want to personally.