I recently started looking up videos of other people feeding their snakes on youtube. I really saw some beautiful snakes and it was awesome observing other peoples feeding techniques. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised... but I was completely shocked to see the amount of comments made on those videos of people Bashing Us ... Calling us animal abusers, and making claims of Animal cruelty. The most common comment was people saying"Burn in hell..." and "I hope you get killed by a snake someday." Those I can brush off as common immaturity and ignorance... But when people accuse me of animal abuse and tell me that what I am doing is morally wrong and disgusting... as a complete animal lover I take it personally offensive. I started spewing bits of fact and knowledge to try to educate readers in the most respectful way possible... But I will admit that I encountered some serious ignorance which had no other way to be dealt with than to just tell them how it is. (if you know what I mean).

Anyway I personally feed live and occasionally stunned... Because I believe the act of killing live prey is a programmed part of the animals instinct as a predator. I feel like it takes something away from the snake if you neglect them of this activity. They would try to tell me that it is not natural because the rat has no chance in an enclosed environment. I don't know what they want me to do... Let my 6 foot Boa and my 4 foot Ball loose in the backyard ... so that they can feed more "naturally" (my boa would probably try to eat a cat). I tried to explain that just because the animal is in captivity does not mean that you should neglect it of it's natural way of feeding. Animals raised for feeding is no worse than the process that put dinner on our plate. If anything this is a more natural death for an animal than the way our food is killed. Anyway, I think I could have wrote a small book about it by the time I was done trying to get a few people to understand.

I don't want this to become an argument here on F/T vs Live. An educated respectful debate is always informative and welcome. What I really want to know is if anyone has encountered this kind of ignorance in your adventures in herping... and how did you handle it?