I agree with alot that has been said thus far. Something that I would like to pint out though is, whether people get a kick out of their ball hunting and eating or not is actually irrelevant. If you feed live the same thing is going to happen. So what if you watch and like it. The animal will be dispatched in the same method. Personally to me those people are just enjoying their pet. Yes another animal dies. But it's feeding their animals. Now... I saw this before and I Said it then as well. I feed live out of conveinence... Yes. Mostly because I'm not going to thaw out 10 rats and feed another 50 live ones. That just isn't going to work. So I feed 60 something live ones and get through my feeding routine without all the craziness. That doesn't mean I'm lazy, nor does it mean that I'm cruel or anything else. It means I have a large collection and I do best for that collection with my lifestyle. I have not had any sort of injury to my collection from feeding live in over 2 years. And even then it was a little scratch that healed quickly. A day or two later you couldn't even see it. How do I know? Well because I specifically have a procedure for feeding my balls. And everyone is well watched and any feeding notes are well documented. Not every ball is ok with pk or ft. I know that if you came to my house and thawed 65 rats and went and placed one in each tub maybe 3 would eat. Then if you took the other 62 that didn't and played the rat zombie game feeding would take 2-4 hours. Again, would you do that weekly? When you have other responsibilities like cleaning cages rat/ball/ or otherwise? How about when you have to feed 200 other animals? For me it's Give and take. The welfare for everyone in a whole is most important to me. Cleaned, watered, fed is a daily thing for some of my Herps. Weather you agree or not is unimportant. But try not to group folks with being lazy or sadistic
You can give your ball pythons parasites from ft. I don't know if you know that. It does happen. Just as injury and deaths happen from ft as well. Too hot, or too cold and your ball goes into shock and could die. Accidentally cooking or bad rodents etc and your ball could die.
What I do know Is I breed my own rats. They are healthy, parasite free and kept in immaculate conditions. You should see some rodent breeding operations that breed to provide ft. I'm sure some of them aren't the most pleasant conditions for the rats. I'm sure even some of them are inhumane.
Freezing doesn't kill all parasites. I beleive there's a few members here who's balls are being treated or have been treated for tape worm and they were only fed ft.
So like I have said before there are many pros and cons to each way. Just because you feed live because its more convenient, or you like to watch your snake eat, doesn't make it worse or cruel to the rats or anything like that. If people were sticking live rats in tubs letting the snake constrict it and then taking the rat away and lettin the snake do it over and over again I would consider that cruel. But them again we all have our own opinions.
Btw fwiw yes rodents and other live prey can kill snakes. Many of those situations like the picture you captioned Gavin, is from days or weeks of a rodent being left in a closed off area with the snake no food no water. So yes their instinct tell them how to survive. But that isn't the normal, and you won't find one person in here anyways that just throws rodents in tubs or cages and walks away and that's the end of it. Every technique has its own procedure. You follow that and you'll really Hve no issues. You don't and either way can kill your snake.
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