Quote Originally Posted by mykee View Post
This is a simple one;
You have been overfeeding your ball python so much that he finally decided that since you weren't going to stop feeding him, he should take matters into his own hands (so to speak) before you kill him with food.

I see this all the time; someone has a baby ball python who WILL eat anything so the owner (usually a dude, this matters) figures that since the animal is willing he'll just keep feeding him so he can have the biggest yearling ever seen.
Big mistake.
More than likely, not only are this animals kidneys in really rough shape, you've most definitely shortened his lifespan considerably and forced him to go off food because you couldn't regulate his eating.
Please don't come back and say you don't powerfeed, because any animal that triples in weight in three months has been powerfed.
I disagree with you on this one...feeding a young snake an appropriately sized meal every 5 days, which is what the OP said he did, is NOT powerfeeding. Powerfeeding is inserting a second prey item into the snake's mouth as it finishes swallowing the first.

If you think about it, in the wild there are periods of time when prey is abundant, followed by times when there is less food available. Snakes are designed to eat alot when its available and fast when its not. It's also normal for subadults to go off feed, and it's fairly common for temp drops to trigger this in ball pythons.

Also, I'd stay away from gerbils. It's going to be a huge pain if the snake imprints on gerbils and since he's in no danger of starving to death there's no reason to try them. Gerbils are also much more aggressive than rats, so feeding them live is a bad idea...