Rat scared our snake

[ZinniaZ]

I am sure this has happened many a time, but I need advice on how to help my son's snake through this. We have been feeding live for a while. She is touch and go on frozen thawed and wasn't eating well so we switched. Always supervised, etc. Well a couple months ago, we gave her a rat and it immediately ran on top of her and bit her. It was just super active and biting. We scrambled, got the tank unlocked and open, grabbed the stupid rat out and left ehr alone. Ever since, she has been afraid of rats. She has eaten maybe two since then. Very little young babies, but now she won't even eat the young weanlings and just retreats. We have put very quiet young ones in and sat and waited and watched. Rat sits in corner, she hunts all around, advances, retreats and eventually goes into her hide and... hides. She is fine eating mice but now she is pretty big and will only take two mice at a time and they are just very small weightwise for her size. I'd say the mice are maybe 24 grams each and before the rat and her subsequent food strike, she was eating 100 g rats. We were basing the rat size on her weight. I haven't weighed her recently as we are trying to leave her alone so that she will just EAT.

We switched her to a dark tub. Temps and humidity are good. Tub is a bit small for her size but don't want her in too big a space right now. She was in a glass visionarium and we decided to try to make her more hidden and hopefully more secure to help with the eating. She ate two mice last night.

My plan is this (and I am looking for input on whether or not this is a good plan):

Keep her in the tub.
Feed her two mice every five days because the mice are not big enough but she needs to eat.
Once she is eating the mice super regularly, try to feed one mouse followed by a rat that has been coated in mouse shavings so it will smell mousy.

????

Any thoughts?

[Oxylepy]

Hrm, personally I'd say leave her alone for a week or two depending on her size and when you go to feed her a rat feed her a small one that you feed, water, and allow to calm down before giving it to her. With all live mice/rats I am going to feed I keep them for a few hours before feeding and I have a nice little container for them to live in that I keep in a dark place and it's filled with food and water and a nice little area for them to hide out and feel comfortable. I then throw them in an empty container with a few pieces of food for around 10 ~ 15 minutes so that they can poop, pee, and their scent can get to the snake so it becomes prepared to eat. This way there shouldn't be any poo or pee when they are attracted, and hopefully they won't be hungry when they are put in with the snake. Also they should be fairly calm.

Oh, and while I despise mice and barely handle them at all, I play with and pet the rats since they tend to be calm and good natured animals, this adds to their own comfort so that when they are fed to my largest snake (the only one that I feed rats to) they are less likely to attack.

Also, how often do you feed (with rats)? How much does your snake weigh?

Also for frozen; how do you thaw? If you get the temperature for the rodent up high enough the snake will be more likely to attack it.

[anatess]

I can't really answer this question but I just wanted to share this very wierd experience I had 2 days ago. We have a finicky 900g bp. We feed her live rats as well - supervised, of course. Again, these crazy things always happen when my husband is out playing basketball! The kids (a.k.a. snake experts) were already asleep, so, I was by myself and I only have roughly 3 months of snakesperience. Anyway, I went ahead and fed the bp myself. I picked a good size rat (we raise our own) and dropped it in the feeding tank. The bp was not interested at all. Just went cruising around the feeding tank looking for a way to get out. Well, the rat was just sitting quietly in the corner when the bp, whose head was way up on the lid of the 10gallon tank, slid off the glass and dropped on top of the rat. It freaked the rat out and he bit the bp's neck! I scramble for my air spray (keyboard cleaner), the bp makes a small yank but the rat was still stuck to his neck so the bp stayed still. I make a quick spurt of air on the rat and he let go and my was-not-interested-in-eating-before bp pulls back and WHAM! nails the rat right behind the neck. It was sooo fast I still had the red thingee of the air spray closeby and it got coiled with the rat! Needless to say, she decided to eat after all. I checked the bp out before I returned her to her viv and I didn't see any marks on her neck. I don't know. Maybe their skin is thick enough to withstand a rat bite for a short bit? Anyway, I'm going to have to find out if this puts her off rats in the next weeks.

[Oxylepy]

Hrm, the air spray seems like a bad idea in my experience. First they put an extremely foul bittering agent in them to deter the usage of it as an inhalant. Second they have this nasty tendency to spray straight propellant, which is often butane, a chemical with an extremely low boiling point that cools objects it touches. A slight bit of butane on the skin will cause irritation, a bit more will actually freeze the skin, any more than that and, well, on a small animal you could end up killing it through freezing.

I know these things because the moment I realized I could get butane out of them I started playing with the freezing factor of it (drop some water in for ice, lol, it's actually really entertaining) and this was cool and all until I ran into the ones with the bittering agent, which will make you feel sick. It's horrid.

[ZinniaZ]

Yikes anatess! Sounds scary-- glad your snake took the rat out.

To answer your questions oxy, when she was eating the rats, the rats were about 10% of her body weight. I haven't weighed her recently because I didn't want to know as she wasn't eating. I can't remember her last recorded weight--I'd have to go look it up. I'll weigh her again next time I feed her.

We did leave her alone for about ten days after she refused the rats. We kept offering every week to ten days to try to make sure she was hungry and she just wouldn't touch them.

She used to eat every seven days.
She must have been 1000+ grams when she stopped eating rats.
We defrosted in warm water and put the head under a light bulb to heat it, but we have not offered frozen in a really long time.

[m00kfu]

I'd just wait it out. Many people consider a 60 gram rat plenty for any ball, so she may have just had her fill of rats for a while. She also could just be hitting the 1000 gram wall. Seems a lot of girls will turn picky once they hit the 1000 gram mark. I've got a couple of girls over here that were garbage disposals, but once they hit that wall they've turned into pretty picky eaters.