live vs f/t

Bruce is ultimately right: feed what works for your snake.

Sometimes the live or f/t decision is a philosophical one. I meet quite a few people who just can't bring themselves to feed live food. Others are not bothered by it. There are, however, some other things to consider:

1. Volume of feeding and time. If you maintain a large ball python collection you are much more likely to need to feed live. My collection includes a few hundred ball pythons and feeding live food already takes a full day. Using f/t would take a lot longer. I simply don't have time to thaw food, warm it and dangle it with tongs. It's a lot faster to drop a rat in the cage and check on them 20 minutes later.
2. Reusing uneaten food items. A live animal that is refused can simply be put back into a holding cage for another try on another day. A f/t animal is a decomposing piece of meat with a much more finite lifetime. For me, re-freezing has never been an option. It's a now or never feeding event. For this reason I actually keep a few 'scavenger' snakes in my collection; one's I can throw uneaten food items in with and make sure they don't go to waste. The limited ability to re-use f/t food also leads to a discussion of cost.
3. Cost. If you feed large numbers of animals f/t and they don't get eaten you end up throwing away a good number of food items. If each f/t rat cost you $1 and you have to throw a bunch away each week then it's easy to see the financial waste. I have little to no waste like this when dealing with live food.

FWIW, if I kept a large colubrid collection I would probably offer them f/t. The don't tend to be as finicky as ball pythons and using f/t with them could actually save money.

Regards,

I have an 08 Normal that I am trying to keep on F/T. She decided to take a 3 week break from eating around Christmas but I have had no problems since. She is right around 300 grams now. I have been offering two mice since she went back on feed. I have a bag of mice (purchased 50 from a friend who orders from I think rodent pro) in my chest freezer. I take 2 out and put them in a zip lock bag, the kind you can put in boiling water, and place that open in the room to prescent. About 15 minutes before I want to feed I put the bag, closed now between a heating pad that I fold in half. The pad is the kind you buy to sit on i guess, its about 1' by 2' has 3 settings and shuts off automatically. This gets the mice up to a nice alive temp, maybe a bit warmer than a living mouse. I then offer one. She normally takes one and refuses the other. I cut 1/4 of an inch of the tail and refreeze the uneaten mouse. Next feeding I offer the mouse with the cut tail first. The third attempt like this she finally took the second mouse. I find the heating pad is an easy way to warm up the mice evenly and to the perfect temp. Zip lock bag ensures the heating pad doesn't get too smelly and helps me not to touch the mice. I don't like to get any of my scent on the mice. I would not switch to live just to try and break a winter fast. If the fast goes to long then sure but snakes fast in the winter and some have been known to have problems going back to F/T. F/T is much less work for me and I am in no hurry to make weight for breeding or anything, but in the end you have to do whats best for you and the snake. People often say the snake first and then you second. I think that's mostly something that is said to impress upon a keeper that the snakes health is more important than the keepers whims. It does not mean that the snakes whims are more important than the keepers whims, or that the snakes health is more important than the keepers health. There is a long list of things that are more important than my snakes health, but my snakes health is more important than any of my whims. F/T or Live you have to do it right so read up.

thanks for all of the replies. Just so we are all in the same understanding, I DO thaw and warm the f/t mice, he just does not like them as much I guess. Anyway, I keep an eye out for him if I give him the live mice.