Live food...why? Honestly & with facts!

[wolfy-hound]

I feed live for my convience.

I always tell people that FT is safer and preferred. But with 30+ snakes, thawing 30 rats out and hoping everyone eats FT is a pain. Doing the zombie rat dance for a snake is no big deal, but doing it for 30+ snakes is a pain.

If you have a ton of leftovers, what next? Throw them all out and waste them? I have monitors, but I can't feed a ton of rodents to them. Feed the snakes in staggered feeding? Again, it's a pain, since then I've got to keep a staggered feeding schedule that will change EVERY feeding day if someone refuses and I give that rodent to someone else.

I've never ever 'enjoyed' watching a animal die. Not when I butchered my own animals for food, not when I've hunted and not when I feed my snakes. It doesn't gross me out or make me feel 'immoral' in any way. It's just part of life. I watch the snakes to make sure the rats don't harm them. If a rat isn't struck just right, I can interfere if it attempts to bite. Is that foolproof? Of course not. There's a possibility the snake could get bitten.

But then, pythons are pretty tought, and even if a rat does get struck poorly and take a few extra seconds to die, they can't automatically bite your python's head off. It's rare to get a injury from a feeding, as opposed to a unsupervised rodent in a snake's bin for days.

FT is always the safe bet. But between snakes that refuse to eat FT, the convienance of live esp for those of us breeding our own, and the mydrid number of other reasons, there's always probably going to be some live feeders.