If you are still ordering rodents from Rodent Pro, please read this.
A friend of mine lost one of their prized boas to a toxic feeder recently. The animal was fed a rodent, it then regurged the rodent, the regurged rodent smelled a million times awful than any regurge he ever experienced and a day later he found his boa had passed away.
This very scenario, item for item, word for word, has occurred hundreds of times in collections throughout the U.S.
Many of them go unreported, but for those that are reported there are many that have a singular thing in common: they got their feeders from Rodent Pro.
There are many theories on just what is lingering in these rodents that cause the death in healthy boas, but the major issues are feeders high in fat content and feeders that were not being fed proper diets or were not frozen properly after being euthanized. Since Rodent Pro very commonly practices in out sourcing their rodents without informing people of where they actually come from, poorly raised rodents are the most simple of explanations.
Some boas have brushes with these toxic feeders and only end up losing a few layers of colors with an awful shed following very rank feces or even a regurge, but other boas are not that lucky and die soon after being exposed.
There are still people who have ordered from RP that had never had an issue that say there is no way to prove the feeders are the issue and that the animal just, for whatever reason, had some sort of septicemia in its system and died from it.
But when time and time again animals are dying from a singular source, one has to consider the source itself.
I used to order from Rodent Pro. Many times I got rodents that reeked of urine, were dirty and had missing body parts. One batch I thawed out was completely disgusting and useless and I had to throw all of it out with little cooperation from RP.
After getting tired of the shoddy packaging and roulette wheel of what quality I was going to be getting order to order as well as random fowl smelling waste coming from my boas, I looked for another option. When I encountered another operation that vacuumed sealed their animals and raised them properly, I was shocked at the difference in quality and I made the decision to never return to Rodent Pro.
Not long after that I discovered the stories of those that lost their animals to RP feeders. Some lost entire sections of their collections, others only a singular animal. Every one of them described the same problems preceding death.
The reason many people go with RP is they are really cheap compared to others, but given their habit of out sourcing, their poor handling of an outbreak of a zoonotic disease and people who have these stories of animals dying shortly after being fed from RP feeders, I am strongly suggesting my friends or anyone else using RP seriously consider a new feeding source for their boas.
Are the discounted prices really worth the risk or the chance?
This is not just about one man losing one boa. The stories are out there guys. The links are there as well. Yes, boas die from toxic feeders from other sources, but the amount of people who have had them die specifically from RP stock should be enough to make you question things.
I, personally, will not feed my animals rodents I cannot verify the origins of.
Some reading for you to consider.
http://deviantconstrictors.com/blog/...your-boas.html
http://www.faunaclassifieds.com/foru...d.php?t=334751
http://ball-pythons.net/forums/showt...gitis-Outbreak.
