Potentially dying ball python?

Because the animal has been eating mice for the past 13 years switching may be hard and take a while from a few month to a year, if you have access to mice feed 4 a week.

And please keep the VET away from this animal, explorative surgery because a BP is loosing weight :rolleyes: :mad:

The only thing the vet should be doing if she is really that concern about the weight loss is a fecal float, not as exciting but really the only right thing to do.

As for aging 13 years is nothing BP have been know to live past 40.

Feed her right examine your husbandry, make sure she is well hydrated etc

I'm curious to know why you say since they are handled More often feeding f/t is a must. Feeding live doesn't mean an increased the likelihood of being bitten. I'm not saying to feed live, as I feed frozen thawed to all snakes who will eat frozen thawed.

Some people think feeding live makes them aggressive, Such as feeding in separate tub makes them less aggressive.. myths are myths and wives tails are wives tails.

Since the mice are free I would just feed more of them. Most BP owners don't want snakes that are "mousers" since a large female - and a 2.8 kg female qualifies! - could easily eat 5-8 mice per week. My 2 kg female is taking a medium rat weekly. At $1.50 per mouse from a breeder, or double that from a pet shop, it gets pricey real fast when feeding lots of mice compared to $1-2 for a small/medium rat weekly.

The old caretaker informed me that feeding live nice can make it more likely for the snake to confuse little hands with prey and make them more aggressive (but she failed to notice or look for solutions to the steady weight loss of our three best show snakes, so I should have taken her caution with a grain of salt!). Even if that's not the case we have so many snakes that frozen mice are just way easier to store and feed with.

I'll get in contact with our supplier soon but until then I've instructed the other caretaker to set out more mice. Is the recommendation four for monte and three for the other two?

thanks for all the help guys-- I'm a female college student majoring in Econ (monte is actually older than me!) so I've been learning a lot as I go.

Just an update-- I got in contact with the vet (I have to approve all dietary changes through her) and she approved them and even gave me some campus contacts for rats for the pythons. She's been our vet for several years and also mentioned that at one point we did feed several of the snakes rats (we had much larger snakes before I started working there) so Monte has most likely been fed rats before and might be more likely to eat them. Monte is getting ready to shed, but just in case she was hungry I put two large mice in her bin and fed the others two mice each.

Glad to hear!

I hope everything continues to improve!