you really need to worry about poison.


apart from that, i would say go for it, theoretically, in practise there are problems. Compare it to domestic cats that are allowed to go outside, a friend of mine has cats and they regularly bring home birds and mice and rats. Sometimes they bring home living birds and let them loose in the living room, with the result of birdpoop everywhere. Most often they bring home a mouse, and then eat it in the living room, they only leave behind some intestines and a piece of fur and one time i witnessed it. I almost got sick, and wont forget the sound when the cat broke down the skull with its teeth and ate it.

But poison is a real problem, pesticides are also poison, and pesticides that are quite harmless to humans and other mammals, but kill all plant life or all insect life or all fungal life, can still be harmful to reptiles. I guess thats the deal-breaker, unless it happens to be an organic farm you have an incalculable risk there. A cat can deal with any chemicals that dont kill a mouse, because both are mammals and the cat is bigger. But BPs are reptiles.

So, theoretically, im all for it and it has a kind of aesthetic to it, but in practise farms are full of chemicals designed to effectively kill entire kingdoms of life (insect or plant or fungusl) while sparing only mammals, without consideration of collaterals. Examples of extreme unwanted side-effects are easy to find, poisoned insects did drive some bird populations into the ground, and poisoned corn did drive some bee populations into the ground. Would we notice if some product some farmer uses to, lets say, kill all insects would also kill all reptiles? No, we wouldnt notice, at least it would take a long while to notice it.

But then, if someone else uses the same mice for his BPs and it works..... i guess its still possible if you go down this road that soon 20 BPs get supplied by that source, and it all goes well for many years, and monsanto launches a new product and all the snakes suddenly get sick or die because the farmer tried it.

Nature is not the threat here, as i said, cats eat wild-caught animals all the time, and they come back with the occasional tick or diarrhoe, and if they come back with an injury its in most cases either modern life (sharp metal or glass or a car) or another cat that hurt them. But farms can be stacked with different poisons, each targeted to effectively kill thousands or even hundreds of thousands of species while only sparing mammals/humans.