Which feeder to raise: rats mice or asfs?

[mainbutter]

for someone with a small # of ball pythons of varying ages/sizes, who wanted to raise feeders but also wanted to only need to deal with one kind, which would you suggest and why?

[greghall]

ASF's breed fast ,grow to the right size, less smell & they lovem like candy.Rats are good too but grow real fast,they would out grow faster than my BPs would eat them.Mice suck! stink & hard to breed(at least for me can't get a colony going to safe my life).

[mainbutter]

I've never seen an ASF in person.. how do they compare in size to.. "regular"(for lack of a better word) rats?

[truthsdeceit]

I voted for regular rats because they're easier to breed than mice (for most people) and grow to an appropriate size for large bps.

However, if you can get them asf's are supposed to be a very good choice for bp's. I've never dealt with them myself.

But I've also heard that bp's will get 'addicted' to asf's so if you went that route but then couldn't do it anymore you'd have a whole bunch of bp's that don't want to eat anything else. This would be esspecially bad if you ever decided to breed bp's cause anyone you sold a baby snake too would have a horrible time getting them to eat anything but asf's.

[TMoore]

I voted ASF

ASF are easy to breed, have little smell, and don't grow to big for a bp.

[greghall]

The verdict is still out on imprinting,i think they will imprint on mice before a asf.some of mine switch back & forth between rats & asf's with no proplem.you don't want a mouser i have one & its aggravating.

[Jenn]

I raise rats and mice. True, mice smell more, but I really hate the smell of the rats. I put up with the rats becaues I have some very large female BP's who prefer them.

[Emilio]

ASF's are great all around I like them much more than rats cause they don't smell, I bred rats for 8 months and got tired of the stench. ASF's do grow slow. This in my opinion is there only setback.

[dmaricle]

we raise rats and mice, they smell bad but i cant find any asf god i wish i could get some asf lol

[Herpquest]

We breed and feed rats,ASF's, mice and gerbils to approx 300 snakes and, with the exeption of gerbils -kept to feed six LTC females which refuse to eat anything else, the remainder take rats, multies or mice dependent upon the size of the snake. A small number will only accept one of the three or two species from the three.
I think it is important to have a few choices available, sometimes preference is given to one prey species than the others, so we keep a choice available all of the time and freeze 'overspill'.