Stupid question

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Originally Posted by JEWSKIN

unfortunately the last owner thought live feeding was a great idea....thats from a mouse...a good example of why not to feed live I use this snake for educational purposes....not sure of sex anymore was probed male but idk

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Wow, for a mouse to do that much damage, it's clear it was left in there unsupervised for some time. :(

I feed live exclusively to all 50 of mine, have for the past five years, over 10K live feedings, with less than 5 incidental scratches, not a single wound or scar.

yes the scar is intense I feel bad for him/her not sure of sex ugh it can be a pain but oh well lol but it's doing amazing on f/t

I also only pop ball pythons to sex them. I have a set of sexing probes, but I've never bothered to use it on the balls. It's too easy to pop them. I've never actually heard of an injury being caused from popping. I can't imagine someone using that much pressure--the only way I can imagine that happening is if someone just did NOT know how to do it, and thought that increasing the pressure was the solution. It doesn't require that much pressure, just the correct technique.

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Originally Posted by JEWSKIN

see i don't like popping I've seen many snakes injured that way...when the lock up happened it was originally in the other cage with another male and got antsy with the action going on next door was moving around a bit lifted it's tail opened up you might say and nothing popped out so yeah not sure anymore

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I've never seen a ball being injured via popping. That's not to say that it's not possible, but I've never seen it or heard about it from someone I know. Probing, on the other hand, I have seen what can happen to a snake when someone probes poorly. Popping is fairly simple once you learn the right technique and it's not so invasive. I leave probing as a last resort method when I just can't tell through popping.

If you're saying that a male ball lifted his tail and opened his cloaca while a neighboring male and a female were courting/copulating and you didn't see that male's hemipenes, I think it's more likely that he was just scenting the enclosure. If there's no female present for him to lock with, I can think of no reason why he would fully expose his penes. They're delicate organs and not something just dragged along the ground. They take time to coax the female to be receptive before the penes become part of the equation. It sounds like the male you described was simply re-establishing his territory when he caught scent of the other male (who had likely already scented the area around the female) and was in combat mode.

he/she was in a different tank....it would be the one with the scar in the second pic that is suddenly huge and no less has been curling around the water bowl

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Originally Posted by Danounet

There is nothing wrong with live feed, as long as it's done the right way. Unfortunately a lot of people out there do unattended live feedings. :(

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Good example of why leaving a live mouse/rat in an enclosure is a big no no. Feeding live is not the problem, the owner is.