Eating weird things

[SnakesNStangss22]

I have locks on all cages so it will be all good!!! My smallest dog is obsessed with my ball python. She will win and freak out till I pick him up to watch the feeding...

Glad I'm not hated

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[Jeo123]

Well, in fairness, any BP that grew large enough to break out of a locked cage and eat a 5lb dog is a BP i'd probably want put down too. I wouldn't feel safe sleeping with that in my house.

[tmaggieb]

My mother, the worrier, called me one day to relay a story. She heard that a 7-8 ft snake didn't eat for 3 weeks, when the owner took the snake to the vet the vet told the owner that the snake was saving up to eat the owner. LOL I just laughed my ass off.

[Jeo123]

Yeah... that stories been completely disproven. You can look it up online. The easiest reason for why it's not true though is that snakes don't size their food up before eating. If they're going to eat something, they would kill it first, then figure out how to swallow after.

In the wild, you don't get to save up room for a giant meal...

[angllady2]

Considering the fact that even a very large ball python can eat a large rat at best, and even the smallest of dogs is quite a bit bigger than a rat, I don't think a ball would even consider striking an animal that large unless it was severely underfed and desperate, or if cornered and felt it had no choice.

Now perhaps a very small puppy or kitten might be seen as prey, but I would hope no snake owner would be foolish enough to allow close contact between the two. An accident could always happen of course, but especially with cats/kittens, I'd be worried about the damage the claws could do to the snake more than the damage the snake might do.

That being said, I own 6 cats myself, all are decent sized animals, ranging from 7 to 14 pounds. We used to have a large male ball who I swear was Harry Houdini re-incarnated. He figured out how to escape from his cage no matter what you did. More than once I would wake up of a morning and find all 6 cats lined up side by side in the kitchen, staring fixedly at the wall, and would then pull out the laundry basket to find that ball stretched out along the wall behind the basket. Since I know he had been out for a considerable time, I would think if he were going to hurt one of the cats, he had plenty of opportunities to do it. I never found a mark on either the cats or him.

Gale

[Adam Chandler]

Sadly I have heard a few stoies of cats killing BP's, but never the other way around.

[BP-NJ]

Sadly I have heard a few stoies of cats killing BP's, but never the other way around.

Exactly. The snake would be in much more danger than the dog or cat.

[anatess]

a 5lb dog?

A chinese crested dog only goes up to about 10 lbs as an adult. It would be about 5 lbs or so as a puppy/sub-adult.

Really cool-looking dog. I wouldn't mind one of them - especially the hairless mutation that only has hair on its head, tail and paws. One of my kids have allergies.

A chinese crested puppy might be an appropriate size for an adult ball python, but we all know that ball pythons are picky with their food. I mean, my bp's have to be "trained" (for lack of a better word) to take regular rats instead of ASFs... how much more for puppies. My bp's would probably go on a hunger strike before they'd down a chinese crested puppy. But then, I wouldn't want to prove it either.