I'd lean more toward the prey items being too large than being too cold. He typically roams for an hour or more before taking his f/t rodent, so they've certainly cooled off by then. The recent rat pups have been between 15-20% of his body weight (my local supplier isn't very consistent with the frozen prey items, and Petco jumps from adult mice to gigantic rats).

Today, he ignored his f/t rat for hours before I reheated it (in just very hot water) and was reintroducing it on tongs when he struck and coiled. I am religious about heating his prey items, and I use the hair dryer to the head every time. As I said, he usually roams for a while, so the prey item has certainly cooled off by then. He used to eat like a champ. I'll attempt live, if I have to, but I am not convinced he needs to be fed live just yet. As I said, he definitely wants to eat, bites his prey, struggles with it forever, but has recently been unable to sort it out. I was going to go buy him a bunch of mice fuzzies to give him something he could swallow, no matter how wrong he was in his approach.

I think it was probably more of an issue with the size of his prey and/or his inexperience. It's just nice to know they get "smarter" about eating as they get older. These rat pups aren't nearly as fat as he is, so I don't think they're way too big, but if you go by the scale, I can see that some would suggest that they're too big. I'll take that into account and feed him smaller prey items for a bit.