Reminded why I breed feeders

Due to new additions and my females taking their dear sweet time getting pregnant again, I ran into a few weeks where no feeders were ready for snakes. My roommate grabbed a few "gourmet" frozen small rats from Petco. We thawed them in the bags and then dumped them into hot water and were immediately horrified. The water turned cloudy brown/red, fur was coming off in chunks, and the smell was like rotting fish. The rats looked thin, contorted, and sickly. Both packages looked like this and we immediately tossed them!

I decided not to test the rest of their stock and got live small rats from a trusted source. After witnessing what slimed out of those bags I'll never by frozen feeders again!

Yuck! Sounds like they were frozen for too long as well.



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Ugh, that makes me happy that I only have one snake to take care of. Less food to deal with lol.

I never liked buying Gourmet Rodent from the pet store. They were always gross.

Petcos rats and mice are disgusting. If you ever need to gry from a petstore again, use petsmarts frozen feeders, much much better

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Originally Posted by kylearmbar

Petcos rats and mice are disgusting. If you ever need to gry from a petstore again, use petsmarts frozen feeders, much much better

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I'll keep that in mind. Hopefully they won't give me the stink eye. My local Petsmart doesn't sell reptiles or reptile supplies, and if you mention snakes the saff practically turn up their noses at you!

If I had to guess they weren't frozen for too long. Instead they were probably thawed out somewhere along the way and refrozen....possibly even multiple times. That would cause tissue damage to anything, even a steak.

Yeah that's what happens when you buy rats from petco or petsmart. If the rat doesn't explode my snakes won't even touch them. They may be extremely overpriced but it doesn't link to the quality at all.


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and then dumped them into hot water

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This could also be bad news even for the freshest kept frozen feeders. if the water is hot enough it could easily degrade the skin and outside of the feeder.

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Originally Posted by BulkMice

This could also be bad news even for the freshest kept frozen feeders. if the water is hot enough it could easily degrade the skin and outside of the feeder.

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This. I would say your thawing practices are at fault here and not the rat you bought. Plenty of threads go over the 'proper' way to thaw, but I think in general you will find you are going to have a bad time if you thaw directly in the water whether from this or from the body exploding on strike.