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

[Egapal]

Not necessarily. I did mention that if it's a last resort thing, I'm fine with it. But I would say feeding live just for entertainment is a pretty demonic thing to do!

There you go, doing it again. There are reasons between last resort and entertainment.

Some people are just generally ignorant, with the facts presented, it might. But that matters not, the criticism against such people is warranted. And as I said... genuine reasons such as with people like you, I have no beef with. It's only those who "do it for the lulz" or use weak excuses (like it's 'inconvenient').

I don't consider inconvenient to be a week excuse. Depending on the person it can be a perfectly logical reason. I am fine with criticizing the "do it for the lulz" people. I just think you need to be careful you don't cross into lumping the good guys that would otherwise agree with you.

And I understand that! Which is why it's not directed to folks such as yourself.

Thank you. I felt that your comments were in some ways critical of me and people like me. That's all I wanted to point out.

Too much? Hmm, I don't agree. Mainly because I am concerned about unnecessary cruelty to the animal in question, which I believe is something to consider.

You are using words like unnecessary and cruelty and they are sorrily very subjective. What you consider unnecessarily cruel others might not. I don't necessarily accept your assertion that feeding live is unnecessarily cruel. We all agree that the rodent feels pain and we all know its going to die. As long as a person is not feeding live specifically because its more painful to the rodent I don't find it cruel. Casually indifferent to its pain? Sure, but not cruel. Again my rodents feel much less pain in total with me than they would in the wild and I would argue less pain than they would if raised by someone who cared less or was looking to make money on thier life. You may not feel that makes up for the last minute of pain in their life but I do.

Fair enough, but the method of death should still be considered! This is why, for example, I use a snap trap if I have a mouse problem, and never a glue trap (these torture traps rile me up even more, but that's a topic for another day).

I think that's a very valid point that I agree with 100%. Its not analogous though. The death by BP is not even close to a glue trap. I feed appropriately sized rodents and my BP dispatches them very quickly. If my BP was a worse hunter like my king snake was, I would have had to reconsider. For every callous keeper on this forum there many more who really care. I think your message would be better intended if maybe worse received by the average Ball Python keeper than by the members of this forum. The average person on this forum is here because they care enough to put in the time to learn about the many aspects of husbandry. I am all for extolling the virtues of F/T or pre-killed but people can ruin that too. They can feed partially frozen prey. They can buy from sources that don't freeze fresh or who kill their rodents inhumanly. They can cook the rodent in boiling water. They can lay a wet F/T rodent on substrate which can result in impaction in extreme cases. Far better that we find out the what people are doing and why and attack the problems not the action.