I assumed she was looking a little plump, so since I just upgraded her enclosure and all her stuff, I figured it was a good time to change her routine and help her slim down.

I don't know how much she weighs, my vet told me it's not super important if I'm not going to breed her, so I don't have a scale.

But I was talking today to a friend who breeds other snakes (not BPs), and he said she's not overweight at all. He said BPs are thick-bodied snakes and are supposed to be chunky (which, yeah, obviously I know that) and that I should be judging by her behavior rather than her girth. If she's acting hungry, her body is telling her she needs food, and I should feed her.

Mkay but she is *literally always* hungry.

She has always been a voracious eater. Never once went on a hunger strike.

She's about 6 or so, I'm not sure, the person who owned her before me said she was 2 when he sold her to me, but she was also crazy thin and dehydrated, with multiple stuck eyecaps, a massive mite infestation (which isn't even a common thing in the desert, where I live), and scars and bites along her back, in varying healing stages from the guy feeding her live mice.

He also tried his darndest to condescendingly explain to me that balls are desert dwellers and don't need extra humidity. His reasoning for this was the fact that she's a Mojave morph, which he was *absolutely convinced* meant that she's native to here (we live in Vegas, in the Mojave Desert).

So yeah, I didn't really trust anything he said, and I don't know how accurate his guess of her age is.

But she literally always gets in kind of an intense feeding mode whenever she notices people in the room and when we open the tank (she's technically my daughter's snake, but I'm the one who has to get her out of the enclosure because of this feeding mode. She's definitely a "strike first, figure out if it's actually edible later" kind of girl).

It's gotten slightly worse in the last year or so, since I switched her from mice to rats, but even so, as soon as I get her out and she realizes it's not food time, she snaps out of that mode, and has never tried to go after me or my husband or our 8yo. It's not a defensive or stress thing, it's literally just that she's in food mode and wants something she can shove in her face.

But my friend insists that the fact that she's in that feeding mode so often means that she's hungry, and I need to feed her more.

Again, I don't know her weight, the vet said to feed her a rodent about as big around as the widest part of her body, and that's what I do. It's possible the rats I have are a *teensy* bit smaller around than her widest point, but not noticeably.

She's definitely not underweight, in any case. And I certainly don't want to imply that I know more about snakes than someone who breeds them for a living, but I was wondering if I could get some other opinions, because I'm just really not sure I should be feeding her more.

Here's her whole body.



And the main thing, I noticed she has fat folds when she coils.







It's my understanding that rats are more fatty than mice, so should I actually be feeding her smaller ones? Or not as often (it's usually about every 10 days now)?

Or am I totally crazy and she's not actually overweight at all?

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