It's all good, WooHoo times 2!!!!

Well, as many of you saw in my previous post, i was worried about the strike & then disinterest situation with Hissy & the F/T. Well, as I was chatting about it with Marla on AIM, my girlfriend lifted the towel (i had placed the towel in case she was indeed a "private dancer") & she said, "Um, there is no mouse." I was like wait, what!? Well, apparently leaving the mouse in there with her for a few minutes was all the motivation she needed because the mouse had indeed dissappeared. I searched through the glass with a flash light to make sure it was not under one of her hides or anything & it was definately gone. The mice I got are a little smaller than what i was expecting (they are as long as I thought, just not as fat) & I could not see a lump in her body at all. But, since Doc said that she was thin & because the mice are a bit small, i decided to feed her a second one. I thawed it, made it do the dance with the tongs & within 45 seconds that one was on its way to Hissy's Tummyville! I just looked in there & she is fat & happy relaxin in the heat & digesting away!

I apologize for not updating sooner but as soon as I fed her the second mouse, i had to go to work. Apparently i can add my name to the never had trouble feeding category cuz this little girl can eat! :D What a relief, I am SO happy! In a day or two I need to clean her cage (she has some pee pee in her warm hide) but i want to wait til she digests cuz i don't want her regurgin. Daddy loves his fat & happy little angel! 8)

Congrats! https://ball-pythons.net/modules/cop...10353/cool.gif

That's great Eddie! Except I was on the phone and had to leave for my daughter's play, so we never actually got to chat. But congrats on the good feed. :)

Oh yeah! Sorry marla, I tried talkin to you about it. I was talkin to some one, perhaps it was Smulkin. Sometimes i have a hard time keeping track of who is who from the forums to AIM. The names tend to differ so much.

Here is a question though: if the mice are a lot smaller than what I was expecting & than i think she is ready to eat, is it ok to keep feedin her two at a time for a while until this large lot of mice is gone (the one dis-advantage of ordering from rodentpro is that 100 is their minimum) & then just order a bigger size?? :?:

two at a time can be pretty hard on the digestive tract of a snake... so it may be best to feed one most of the time and sparadically feed two or see if you can't sell off some to somone in the area... two every time could take a toll.. these guys would know far better than I though.

If the pray is small, try feeding one a day instead of two at a time.

Oh yah, I'm up at 4.30 in the morning cause my work woke me up :evil:

No, don't feed one a day. That will also make for upset snake tummy. If it doesn't leave a lump, you could try feeding every 4 to 5 days, though, but that's going to give you fewer opportunities for handling. I see offers for frozen mice for sale on the classifieds from time to time, maybe you could do that and restrict the area you'll sell to so you don't have to ship with dry ice.

I honestly don't think it will hurt to feed multiple prey for awhile until you can get the appropriate size. In the wild, they will find a rodent burrow and scarf down as many as they can. It may not be 100% ideal because multiple prey means a higher ratio of undigestible material (like fur) but it most certainly isn't unnatural for them.

A local herp expo is an excellent place to get frozen feeders because you can see and choose exactly the sizes and amounts you want w/o shipping!

I guess thats why they grow to be bigger in the wild :?

Sarcasm, Raj? :( I think we're getting a little wrapped up in one variable of husbandry that has no absolute answers. There are many different methods of husbandry that are perfectly acceptable and if we start insisting that one, and only one, particular method is correct, then we make this forum less than what it actually is.

To the best of my knowledge, there has been no actual studies on the long-term effects of various rodent diets on ball pythons. At best we have a few anecdotes...but for every anectdote on one side of the issue, you'll find at least as many on the other side as well.

I don't think we should insist that our way of feeding our snake is the absolute way and every other method will kill your snake. That's not what we're here for.

Well p00p Judy if there is no righteous path it makes it kinda hard for me to stray from it!

ARGH!

There have also been theories/claims that the faster a snake grows and the larger they get the shorter they live. But these are not drosophila or mice you can so easily throw theories at - given good care your python can live in excess of 20 years.


If nothing else be forewarned that preoccupation with size will find you calling this guy for his special pills:

http://www.angelfire.com/freak2/skee...ide-enzyte.jpg

If you fed two mice, in close succession, wouldn't it just be like the snake swallowed one prey item? I would hesitate to do this, though, since it makes me think of "power feeding" when people tie two or even three prey-items together amd the snake thus swallows them all.

Except there would be a lot more fur and indigestibles to work that stomach over.

Everyone needs colon-cleansing fiber in their diets, Smulkin. :) FWIW, the ball python manual recommends feeding multiple mice before switching to rats. I know there are some who hate the idea, and I'm not pushing it, but I've done it successfully before with a big girl who had no interest in rats. She was as healthy as she could be.

Well, i know that i only did it once but Hissy seemed fine with eating two mice. She was obviously really hungry because she struck the first mouse within ten seconds! But, the general concensus seems to be that feeding two at once is not a good thing to do. What would you all think if i alternated, one one week, two the next, one, then two & so on??

I don't think two mice is a big deal -- it's not like you're asking her gut to process 4 or 5 small prey items. On the other hand, my preference in such a situation would be to feed a single prey item more frequently instead of two at a time. If you switch to one prey item every 5-6 days until you can get her moved up to a single suitably-sized prey item, that will probably be less difficult for her system to process.

LOL Marla I use raw coffe grounds as breakfast-of-champeens! Keeps me regular ;)

On the multi-feed topic there seems to be a lot of contradictory advice floating around out there, along with half-baked theories like pinheadism, response of gut flora, tail-extrusion (rodent tail not swallowed far enough). In neph's case I am moving her up to rats since one mouse (even a mondo breeder) isn't enough and counting on a feeding response for the second can be a crapshoot sometimes.

Smulkin, more power to ya for the coffee grounds. My stomach is cramping just thinking about it! ;)

There does seem to be a lot of contradictory advice, so I have to go by my best sources. In this case, that would be my vet, the ball python manual, and my own experience with keeping ball pythons. All of those tell me that you can keep a ball python healthy and feeding on multiple prey items, but that doing so is not the optimal choice. I know David is adamantly against feeding mutiple prey items and I understand his reasoning for it, but if it's a matter of willingness to eat or availability of prey items, my preference is to do whatever works to keep the snake eating (within reason -- forget all that old-timer crap about sausages and such).

Heheh - good deal. Now about keeping my new girl on top of that 400W subwoofer . . .

;)

My BP has been eating 2 mice at each feeding for over 2 years and is very healthy. I would like to change over to a single rat per feeding but everytime I go to the pet store all they have are medium large to large ones and they are bigger round then he is. Plus, I dont want to put a live one in (like I do my mice) for the fear of the rat being very aggressive and hurting my BP. So far, my BP has refused anything except live. The only good thing about killing a rat and then Monty not eating it is that now that Andariel is here with Sprocket, I could toss it in his cage and not worry about wasting a rat. So... I think I just talked myself into giving it some more tries. Will just have to keep mice on hand incase he refuses the rat.

Smulkin, LOL. I'm sure she's got the boogie fever. :lol:

Carl, there's definitely something to be said for having Sprocket or someone like her around to clean up after the picky eaters. I certainly can't blame you for not wanting to feed live rats in with your BP because they are certainly capable of doing a lot of damage once they're weaned. Of course, if you could find a source for fuzzy rats, you could use that as a transitional stage to get him switched over but I understand it may be difficult to find a source -- it's difficult for me and I live in a metro area with nearly 4 million people.