Do you keep snakes and Pet rats?

[Michelle.C]

I keep (kept) Rats and Snakes as pets. I currently do not own any rats, for space reasons only. I feed f/t mice and rats to my snakes, I will not feed a live rat. I have had to feed live mice to a few snakes to get them started though.

When I did keep Rats as pets, they had the left side of the critter room and the reptiles had the right side. I never noticed a negative reaction from either sets of animals. I owned over 40 Pet Rats and 70 Reptiles at that that time. The only thing that ever worried me was one of the snakes escaping and getting into the Ferret Nation (Rat cages). I took extra precautions to make sure that would never happen.

As far as moral issues with feeding rodents, I never had much of an issue. My views are simple; as long as you respect a prey animal (throughout it's life and after) and make sure it's death is as painless as possible, I can accept that it is the circle of life and all things to need eat.

Personally, I do not like feeding f/t, but I do the best I can to make sure the animals death is as peaceful as I can possibly make it when I am forced to feed a live rodent.

I enjoy both hobbies, throughly. My mindset was, yes I am feeding f/t (or live) rodents, but..One set are my pets, the other are animals that were bred strictly for food and never shown any human emotion. To me, once an animal has bonded with a human, it's out of the question to feed it to another animal. It's weird logic, but..just my opinion.

If you want to use my comment on your site, you are more than welcome.