Feeding question for breeders

[ApathyAngel]

Quite simple.
Live=throw rodent in tub/enclosure and move to next tub/enclosure.
Frozen=get rodents out of freezer, thaw over a duration of time, wiggle in front of snake for 0-? seconds/minutes, move to next snake.
Multiply that by possibly hundreds of snakes in some people’s cases. By the time you go down a rack of live feedings you can quickly check the first snakes offered in that rack and remove any rodents not consumed.


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Oh wait, you're actually holding each and every rat with tongs and wiggling it in front of each and every snake until it strikes? Dang, I didn't know breeders do it one by one like that.

I imagine that would've taken me forever back when I had 4 snakes to feed. I can't imagine doing it with hundreds.

Well that makes perfect sense, then. And it totally explains the question I had about total time invested. I couldn't picture how cleaning, feeding, and maintaining a large population of rats would be less time than feeding f/t, but if you're actually holding each rat for each snake, one by one, the time thing makes so much more sense. Yeah, it would definitely take less time to breed rats than it would to do that.

Thank you! I was so confused about that, I couldn't picture it at all, but you explained it perfectly.

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[rufretic]

Oh wait, you're actually holding each and every rat with tongs and wiggling it in front of each and every snake until it strikes? Dang, I didn't know breeders do it one by one like that.

I imagine that would've taken me forever back when I had 4 snakes to feed. I can't imagine doing it with hundreds.

Well that makes perfect sense, then. And it totally explains the question I had about total time invested. I couldn't picture how cleaning, feeding, and maintaining a large population of rats would be less time than feeding f/t, but if you're actually holding each rat for each snake, one by one, the time thing makes so much more sense. Yeah, it would definitely take less time to breed rats than it would to do that.

Thank you! I was so confused about that, I couldn't picture it at all, but you explained it perfectly.

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Yep, about 90% of them take a little enticing to get them to hit it and then they will eat it but very few will just take a dead rat laying in there. It's funny because the few that will, typically won't strike no matter what you do lol. So once you learn which ones like what, you still need to invest a lot of time with the ones that need a little dancing. My favorites are the ones that you better have that rat ready when you open the tub or your gonna get tagged cause as soon as that tub opens they are flying out hitting whatever is closest lol. If they all ate like that it would be just as quick to feed f/t.

[ApathyAngel]

Ah, okay. I never really wiggled f/t rats to entice my pickier eaters. I always just tossed them in a circular container with the rat against the wall, and 99% of the time, when I'd go check in 15 minutes, the rat would be gone.

Although now that I'm thinking about it, maybe that's more of a retic thing than a ball python thing. Obviously encouraging a retic to strike moving objects is a bad idea, so that was a safer way to transfer him to f/t when he was little.

It always worked for my ball pythons, though. And there's a breeder on YouTube who does the same thing with her colubrids and it works for them, too. I guess I assumed that's just how most breeders did it.