It seemed so wrong, but felt so right...

[Chocolate Muffin's]

And it seems a few other people feel the way i do. Some people have brought up how is safety is such a concern then why not feed F/T. This is a perfect arguement. Feeding F/T is easy. You put paper towels down, dangle the rat, the snake takes it, constricts, eats and you remove the paper towels and throw away the clean bag you thawed them in. To have a bloody bag is beyond me. If your so concerned about your animals safety then feed F/T. There no torture involved. And what you did is tortue in my opinion and i bet in alot of peoples opinion. I dont care when you did it. As long as the rodent was alive, then it was torture.

What I don’t fully understand about some of the arguments about cruelty stems from something you said also: It seems that it’s humane to hit a rodent in the back of the head so that it dies quickly and painlessly. I realize this is kinda the standard, but it’s something I don’t really want to do. I didn’t take any pleasure in hurting the rodent, but I panicked because it appeared to me to be hurting my snake, and I didn’t want my snake injured at any cost. Some people here have suggested that snakes have thick skin, or that as long as the snake is in the mood to eat, then the animal is not in jeopardy. All of my research has indicated that rodents should never be left alone with any snake, feeding or otherwise, unless the keeper is there to intervene should things go awry.

I understand that you and many people may think that I have tortured these rodents, and I will continue to disagree. – That’s fine. My snakes are the first priority, and if my preventing them from harm was cruel, inhumane, torturous, gruesome, then so be it. I am still going to feed live, I am still go to be fiercely protective of their health and well being, and I will look for more humane ways to protect them from rodent aggression.

I would never expect to duplicate in captivity, what occurs in the wild, so this notion is not a practical solution. Snakes do a lot of things in the wild including eating their young, but this is simply not acceptable while in human care and you know that.

I’d like to think that if my greatest mistake in life was that I mistakenly tortured a feeder rodent once, then I have many great and productive days ahead of me, with my 2 snakes, and any others that happen to come my way.