For convenience live or frozen/thawed?

For those of you that have 10 or more snakes what do you find more convenient, to feed live or frozen/thawed?
If you could please explain. If you do feed frozen/thawed what is your process?

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Originally Posted by Driver

For those of you that have 10 or more snakes what do you find more convenient, to feed live or frozen/thawed?
If you could please explain. If you do feed frozen/thawed what is your process?

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I don't at the moment but I did have 10 snakes at one point. I found that feeding live was a real hassle. Here's a little pro vs. con chart for feeding live for ya.

Pro Live:

- No waste, rats that are not eaten can be saved for next feeding.
- I found i got a better feeding response when feeding live but that could just be my personal experience.
- No thawing or prep time required
- umm...

Con Live:

- Trips every week or more to your local rat source
- Smelly
- "Can," hurt the snake... can..
- Takes up more space than F/T
- Not always available.. and prices can be higher than F/T especially since you can buy F/T in bulk and save some money.
- If you do have to keep them for a week or more you will need to house them, feed them, water them, etc. It becomes more and more expensive.

Here's an example of my situation right now. I bought a medium rat for my biggest BP. The rat was too big for all the other snakes so it sat in the bin. It went 5 weeks without eating and now the rat is in the middle ground of the large classification and way too big for the BP. Now I have a rat and nothing to feed it to. I can sell it, but its already cost me like $5-$10 in food and bedding.

I like feeding live and I still do it only because some of my BP's are irregular feeders and/or won't switch off of live asf. If I had it my way they would all be on F/T.

Hope you can make some sense out of my ramblings.

I prefer prekilled.
I have a few small breeding colonies of rodents and instead of feeding live I feed p/k when I have those really picky snakes.
Otherwise I do f/t which I find kind of a hassle for me feeding 20 snakes every week. If I bred enough rodents I would do p/k for all of them.

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Originally Posted by decensored

Pro Live:

- No waste, rats that are not eaten can be saved for next feeding.
- I found i got a better feeding response when feeding live but that could just be my personal experience.
- No thawing or prep time required
- umm...

Con Live:

- Trips every week or more to your local rat source
- Smelly
- "Can," hurt the snake... can..
- Takes up more space than F/T
- Not always available.. and prices can be higher than F/T especially since you can buy F/T in bulk and save some money.
- If you do have to keep them for a week or more you will need to house them, feed them, water them, etc. It becomes more and more expensive.

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I am currently breeding my own colonies. Most of the cons really wont effect me that much. Im just trying to figure out what I want to do in the long run.

F/T is more convenient if you breed your own rats. That way you don't have to worry about the rats growing to large for you snakes (I only have two.) Captain Hook will eat anything, F/T live pre-killed she don't care what it is. If I can get Ivan on F/T I will do them all this way, let them grow to a certain size then kill and freeze them. I may keep a few to sell to pay for food/bedding but F/T is more convenient if you breed your own unless you have a lot of snakes.

I find FT more convenient for my # of snakes, in the sense that if I raised my own feeders, I would spend more time total focusing on feeding. If I had to go to the pet store to buy feeders, that'd the the MOST inconvenient.

There is a base time cost for raising rats. If I had to average producing 10 baby rats a week, compared to needing to average 100 baby rats a week, I'd spend less time per rat for the latter, so the more feeders you need, the more that raising your own feeders becomes a viable alternative if you're focusing on total time out of your week spent on feeding issues.

There are other pros and cons to feeding live and raising your own feeders, but I feel that at 10-30 snakes, I'm going to feed f/t. Above that I'd probably raise my own, but definitely not before if I only cared about convenience.

I was thinking I'd raise my own about a month ago, just because I wanted to know exactly what my feeders were raised on and how healthy they are before they get fed to my snakes. I'm putting off that decision until spring rolls by.

We breed our own rats, asf and mice. In general live is far more convenient for us. All of our balls and adult corns eat live rats and asf. Our amazon tree boa will eat anything as long as its alive, she doesn't care. Our smaller corns get f/t mice and rats.

oops sorry i didnt read the post of 10 or more but I would feed live if i did. I would just breed the little buggers and sex them so they wouldnt breed all the time I value my freezer space. :P

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Originally Posted by Ogre

I value my freezer space. :P

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Awe, c'mon. Everyone loves digging through hundreds of dead rats trying to find something to make for dinner.

lol exactly. I only have one bp and she so far has only taken f/t once and I was getting particularly frustrated that she wouldnt eat so I switched to live and wala she ate. My fiance is determend to get her back on f/t agian and I just dont want to personally.

i use F/T's... i have a chest freezer in the snake room and i place a order 2 times a year. i dont have a problem thawing,,,,, 5 gal bucket, fill it with the right amount of rats, fill with hot water. ill go do other thing s around the house for about 1 hour, come back empty the water out, fill with hot water again, let set for about 20 minuets and then get to feeding!! if i had the time and space, id breed my own, but id still euthanize and do the F/T thing.. the only problem i have with the way i do it is the OUTRAGOUS shipping charges........
spooky

If I had the option to breed my own rodents again it would be more convenient to feed live to all of my snakes. Since I can't and don't want to make a trip to the store or rodent breeder multiple times a week, frozen is the way to go for me.

Both.

I breed my own rodents I have 7 snakes on f/t the rest are on live. I like having a few that will take f/t just to help me maintain my supply closer to what I use. In the last year I have only had to purchase one rat from a pet store and that was just cause he was cute and my daughter wanted him, go figure.

~ Karl

I just don't want to breed my own feeders! :O Feeder mealworms are fine, they take like no effort, but to properly care for rats in a way I feel comfortable(having had pet rodents before) I would feel like I had suddenly gotten 20 pets dumped on me if I was trying to breed them. For me, I'd rather to f/t. I don't mind having to go get a live or p/k for the occasional stubborn feeder. For me it means convenience in that my time is not filled up with the extra time it takes to clean them to the point where they don't stink and deal with stillborn babies, rodent health problems, getting attached to more short lived animals, feeding, general maintenance.. I will have enough of that with the other pets I WANT to have! But that's just me! I just don't want a rodent colony personally. I know there are a ton of pros that may outweigh the cons, but hey, it's just a personal thing :)

And thawing has never been a hassle for me. I plan ahead on my feeding day and get all the food out in the morning before I go through my daily routine. Do schoolwork, get food, all that jazz while they heat up to the temp of our warm reptile room all the way through their bodies. Then when it's time to feed I blast them with a hairdryer for about a minute and it's feeding time! I think some people suffer from the 'watched pot never boils' aka 'the watched rodent never thaws'.. Just chill out, it'll be warm soon. Let the snake sniff out that good rat smell in the air and have to wait, it'll just mean he's more excited when you do feed them! :D

And my family has ALWAYS had a second fridge in the garage with an empty freezer, so when I move out, I'll be continuing that tradition of the extra freezer. So I have room for my frozen meats for my snakes! :D

I am so pleased that I have been able to get almost all of my ball pythons converted to frozen / thawed in the past few months. That means I can cut way back on the rodent breeding, which I am in the process of doing. As far as process goes, the night before I am going to feed, I get out about as many rats to thaw as ball pythons that need to be fed. I warm them in hot water and feed them on tongs. They either strike it off the tongs or they don't. If they don't, I will not leave it in their cage, hoping they will eat it sometime during the night, because that rarely works and results in lots of waste from my experience. Typically one or more ball python will refuse its meal, and I expect that. After all the pythons have had their frozen / thawed rats offered, whatever is left goes to the boas and retics, which never refuse anything unless they are in shed. If I have to thaw a couple more for the boas and retics, that is just fine. In any case, there is never any waste.

I currently have 20 snakes. Everyone is on ft. I don't have the space for rats and don't want to donate the time to caring for them. I have an extra freezer in my garage (got it off Craigslist for $50) that is solely dedicated to rats.

Feeding day I get out as many as I need, and warm them in hot water. Usually takes about an hour with water changes every 20 mins (I set my kitchen timer). Then feed. Whatever doesn't get eaten goes to someone else or gets refrozen for next week.

I do go to the pet store for stubborn feeders who want live (currently only have 1 of them right now). I'm working on converting him.

I take them out of the freezer put them all in a 5 gallon bucket with warm to hot water, not to hot to burn your skin. Let them defrost take them out of bucket dry off and feed i keep anywhere between 20 and 100 feeders in my freezer at any time and restock every 3 months. If something isn't eaten it goes back in the freezer and is the first things feed off next week