Eating Their Food While It's Still Alive...

Anybody else's snakes decide that they don't need to actually kill their live food?

One of my babies just ate his rat crawler while it was still alive - He did constrict it, but the thing was still kickin and squeeking all the way down the hatch. And it went down butt first.

He's not the only one - my Pueblan will eat anything - and doesn't bother to wait for her live stuff to die before eating it - butt first. Every time.

I think its slightly amusing(obviously not for the rat), but I'm also concerned that once they start eating prey large enough to actually fight back - If I can't get them switched over to f/t, will they learn to kill it properly? I don't want their INSIDES to possibly get cut open and..yeah :/

I have never seen that with any of mine. They choke them off entirely, and start with the head. I have heard of it before, but not sure why they do it. Maybe they will figure it out. It you do f/t you could always hit the head with hair dryer trick, to make that the hottest point.

I've seen it quite a lot when I was keeping corns and a few times with bp's.

I've seen it with my boa the first few times I fed her hoppers. Since then she has been pretty good with live. I do find amusing as well, but then again it really isnt too great for the feeder. :(

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wouldnt eating it live be dangerous for the snake? i would think it could do some internal damage

It's something I see in young snakes often enough when feeding live. It usually only takes a retaliatory bite(or scratch or sometimes just an extremely active/struggling prey item) for their constricting instincts to kick in and have them start wrapping.

My boa would do that if I didn't give her dead prey because she simply doesn't constrict anything.. I'd hope she would if I put a live rat in there but when I switched her to prekilled, the rat could still be twitching it's back leg (nerve impulse) and she would be swallowing it.. This is a 5ft boa so it's strange to say the least. Now I wait until any twitching has completely ceased before putting them in there.

If you're concerned that your snake won't break the "lazy" habit, just switch to thawed or prekilled now and save yourself the worry.

I had a ball do this one time and it was horrible! Still live, back broken from the constricting and squealing the whole way down. It was the worst thing I've ever seen. Shes never done it again though.

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Yeah, its not exactly great for the rodent, but at the same time - that snake has to be laughing maniacally in their head...

I just hope that it doesn't end up hurting them in the end. I've been trying to switch them to f/t but so far they've refused. I haven't tried every trick yet - so I'm not frantic or anything. At least they are eating.

Okay, this sounds horrible, but this might work. When feeding f/t we had an issue where our ball python wasn't quite interested in the rat. He would constrict..and get bored and leave. A different problem than you are having I know, but hear me out.

What ended up helping was after the initial bite we sort of held onto the rat from the feeding tongs for a bit, gently kind of wiggling it, like the rat was trying to escape(think a very gentle game of tug-o-war, so you aren't hurting or pulling against the snake's teeth hard, just wiggling the food more)

When we do that with either our ball or our boa they constrict much tighter around the rodent. I can imagine the same would happen if it were a live rodent as well. I wonder if that could help, um, encourage the snake to squeeze with a bit more oomph to kill the rodent instead of having the poor thing die in an even slower and more painful way!


Also, the trick I used that finally got my picky ball to eat f/t reliably... It's a sort of bait and switch type method. We put a live rat in a kritter keeper, actually held it sideways. Let all the vents in the lid leak out that live rat smell that drives the snake so mad. Just having a live rat in the room makes this ball python go into hunting mode! Right in front of the cage with the live rat, we dangled the freshly thawed frozen rodent. Maru took it instantly as if it were 'the real thing' :D Since then, he's been taking them non stop!