Quote Originally Posted by adamjeffery View Post
if your planning on breeding your snakes and selling babies, then i would suggest you stick with mice or normal rats. the last thing you want to do is get a baby stuck on african soft furs or gerbils, then have a customer who doesnt have access to the same food source. they can normally be switched over but its an inconvenience to the customer to have to worry about.
i wont even bother purchasing or even looking at snakes on soft furs. the whole reason asf's got so popular is they work great for getting wc or ch animals eating. with the cb animals its really easy to get them started on mice or rats. ive never had a hatchling i couldnt get to eat. ive had ones that were slow starters or even the few that needed assist fed a few times but imho its still better than soft furs.
adam jeffery
I heard this from a lot of people, but I have to say, my experience doesn't support this. All my snakes are on ASFs. I had my first clutch this year and I have a hatchling that was hatched on 7/31 and UNTIL TODAY is still being assist fed. He struck and coiled an ASF on his own on the first week of November but hasn't done it ever since.

So, that theory about ASF providing better feeding response... meh. Not true in my case. My bp's are eating like everybody else's bp's. Sometimes they eat, sometimes they don't.

And I sold my extra hatchling just fine too.

And I bought 2 hatchlings that were eating regular rats, switched over to ASFs without a problem.

So yeah, I have a different take on this.

Facts are:
  • OP has 4 snakes - babies from what I understand.

  • Getting a mice colony is not going to last him for the long term - they will eventually need to get on rats before a year is up (unless he decides to feed mutliple mice when the snakes get to be adults).

  • Starting a rat colony is not going to be very good for 4 small snakes - they'll outgrow the snakes easily. So, unless you plan on freezing the rats when they get to a certain size, this is going to be difficult to cycle.

  • ASFs are the better solution - they grow slow and they won't outgrow the snakes.


Worry about breeding later. If you need to switch them to rats to sell, you can do so then.