To answer the thread question I feed every Friday... and they eat readily.
To put in my two cents about the Live vs. F/T...
I am not going to knock anyones tried and true methods of feeding... It is your choice on how you want to feed the snake. This is only my opinion ... I personally feed Stunned Live. I think the only reason F/T exists is for the conveniece of the human and not for the benefit of the snake. I am going to to split this into a couple key points.
1. Nature designed our snakes to hunt and kill live prey. Snakes are not scavengers. Maybe it happens but I have never heard of a wild snake ingesting something that was dead when they found it. It is one of my snakes primal intinctual behaviors to find that warm little animal... attack, constrict them and swallow them. I personally think it is borderline cruel to keep a captive snake and neglect them of this behavior. When a snake stops contricting before it eats... That is sad, as it is just loosing touch with it's natural behaviors.
This is my Favorite point to make on this issue...
What if we forced you to eat Mushed up food through a straw for the rest of your life because there was a danger of you chipping a tooth on a bone. No more chewing cause it's dangerous... Even though that is what we have our teeth for! Eventually our jaw muscles would turn incredibly weak. Then if we ever wanted to use our teeth again they would be almost useless becasue your jaws muscles are worthless. A snake contricting it's food is like us chewing... It's how they were designed to do it. Don't neglect them of chewing their food!
You are forcing your snake to feed in an unnatural way until that is all he used to. Not Good. It is extremely rare for a snake to take F/T on the first try because snakes are not built to recognize dead things as prey... I hate saying it like this but sadly this is what happens... The owner decides F/T is the more convenient way to go (You can easily feed a freshly killed or stunned mouse to the snake... Why crappy frozen stuff???... Becasue it's convenient for YOU)... Then they start trying to feed F/T and most of the time the only way to get a snake to take it is to let it starve until it decides that it will take the F/T. I know "Starve" sounds bad; But a natural predator is only going to take a dead prey item if it is tricked to think that it is alive, or is starving and takes it as a last resort.
2. My Snakes Deserve the Freshems'!!! I looked and looked but I can't find the article I was reding on this. But in a live rat everything is as fresh as could be. The Brain Fluids, Bone Marrow, Oxygenation Level in the blood... are all very good for your snake. All of these things are gone or degraded in F/T. Snakes can survive on F/T... and whether or not you can tell a difference in health on one fed F/T vs Live is very hard to tell, you would have to consider behavior as well as vitamin and nutrient levels. Personally if you ask me the healthier snake would be the one can best exercise their natural instictual behaviors without an issue. A snake fed F/T for years would probably have no idea how to handle a live prey item as he has not been allowed to feed that way... The way nature intended them to eat.
3. Humane? C'mon this is the oldest animal activity on earth... Animals eat eachother... All the way down to Bacterial level... In order for one life to live... something else must die. It works that way for every living organism on earth. This is why rodents have so many babies... Becuase they serve as such a vital part in the food chain feeding larger predators. The only possible down side for the snake that I could possibly think of from feeding live would be the risk of possible injury from defensive prey. 99 out of 100 times if you are feeding the proper sized prey item to a healthy hungry snake... There will be no injury. There will always be that risk though which is a little to big for some... Maybe even me...
So considering all of the above... I just take the paper bag and give it a good smack on the ground before I dump them in. The rat is alive, warm and moving... Just has the wits knocked out... And there is virtually no risk of him trying to fight back.
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