We have to female ball pythons that we got over a week ago. Normally, we wait a week and then attempt to feed on our normal feeding day. We were informed that both girls took live so we got two live small rats from the store and began feeding our snakes. The girls are in QT along with our spider and pin.
We offered a rat to the smallest girl (900g) and she refused. She'd go over to it and smell it, then slither away, uninterested. Then we tried the bigger girl who is over 2000g. She began defensively striking at us and the rat. So we left both girls alone for 30 min and tried it again after having the rats sit on top the rack for that 30 min. Again the smaller was not interested in the rat and the bigger girl was striking defensively. She even split the rat's ear open.