Qusetion about reoffering feeder mice.

[valentineboas]

Hi,
We recently heard from our vet that most of the breeders after they offered a mouse or a rat to their snake and snake did not take it they will discard it.
I never heard about this, and since we have mostly ball pythons we usually offer them for another snake, or freeze it and use it later. We would like some opinions because if we do something dangerous or wrong for our snakes we would like to change it.

Thanks for any advice!

Nora and Travis

[1nstinct]

Everyone is different, but a general saying is refreeze once and that's it. I personally throw out, I waste more rats/money but I would rather offer a fresh frozen every feeding compared to offering a refrozen rat.

[CD CONSTRICTORS]

Are you feeding live?

I feed live and I usually get a few less than I think I'll need as someone is always in shed, or will refuse, some will take 2 a few hours apart if given the chance. I hate holding the nasty critters in a critter cage for even a day.

I will discard, or save seperately a refusal from a snake in QT. I will throw a refusal rat from my main stock to a QT snake, but never the other way around.

[valentineboas]

Oh, we don't refreeze anything, we mostly feed live, and we have some who eat frozen or prekilled, so if somebody did not eat the live, than we kill it, and offer it to another one if that one don't take it right away we freeze it before it's getting hard, and once we thawed out a mice and they don't eat it than we discard it.

[Zombie]

Refreezing once is fine. Definitely don't want to do it more than once.

We feed live, any left overs are frozen and reused during next feed

[SlitherinSisters]

Either way, live or frozen you can offer it to a different snake. As far as frozen goes, you can freeze it again, but you should only thaw it twice, it will get mushy and start falling apart.