When to intervene

[Mr_Hughes]

I moved my balls Simon and Malcolm up to a large rat today (they'd stopped eating over winter and once I got them to eat again I started on smalls moved to mediums and decided to try a large to get them back up to weight. Simon took his with little issue. took him from 4:30 or 5 until about 7:10 or so, but he had it all down and was just finishing the tail when I checked. Malcolm on the other hand has barely gotten past the shoulders. Is there a time I should start worrying and intervene or will he be alright and give up on his own. He's working at it just slowly and he had to wrestle with it longer than Simon. Note:I can't get them to eat frozen or I'd have just done that but they went on a frozen strike the first winter I had them and kept it up.

[Mr_Hughes]

never mind he just gave up the rat.

[Slim]

In my experience Large rats are too big for most male BPs. In fact, small rats are the largest I feed adult males.

Having said that, your snake should either be able to get it down, or work it out of his mouth on his own. It's certainly worth keeping an eye on though if you can do that without stressing the snake further.

It may sound counter intuitive, but you actually encourage irregular feeding when you give them prey that's too large.

[Stewart_Reptiles]

Males even females do not need large rats, males do not need anything bigger than small 55/75 grams weekly unless of course you prefer your animals not to feed consistently and have trouble eating the meal offered.

I have 4000 grams animals that eat 150 grams rats at the most and the males even the large ones get half that.

Because they can take down larger prey does not mean they should.

[Mr_Hughes]

Slim: Thank you for the information. I never thought about that being a problem before. These two have been a learning experience compared to my other two Bps when I was a teenager. My other two never had problems and I was a dumb teenager then. of course even if I did have problems everyone treated me like a dumb teenager if I asked a question... so I stopped asking questions people were always grumpy.. actually I'd get rude sounding answers like Deborah's here. your politeness has gone a long way to help me. I will stick to mediums and smalls. don't know what I'm going to do with the large I hate wasting money, but I guess that's a part of the new learning experience.