Ball python losing weight

[patientz3ro]

There is a big difference between animals in the nature and our pet snakes. I hope everybody understands that.

There is no reason to feed live. No reason to put snake at risk. You wouldn't strangle your snake to death, no reason to do it to the prey either.
But maybe this is not the place for this discussion.

Maybe OP's snake has been on f/t all his life. Maybe the previous owner just neclegted his care. Nobody knows. It's plain stupid to start with live when it may very well take f/t. If it simply wont accept f/t, then by all means give it a live one.

To give you a little perspective, here is Hope's story: http://ball-pythons.net/forums/showt...nourished-ball
I got tons of good advice with Hope, maybe there is something useful for you too

Careful!! That's a VERY slippery slope. Honestly, there are a LOT of reasons to feed live, just as there are a lot of reasons to feed f/t. Full disclosure, I feed f/t, and Ajja has only had 3 live mice since I got her @ 8 weeks. Incidentally, she also came from LLL.

While there IS a difference between wild and CB, in the first few months, you want to stick as close to the behaviors and instincts of a wild BP as possible. I'm not an animal psychologist, veterinarian, or herpetologist, but animal behavior IS a major interest and area of study for me. I may have some...unorthodox ideas (right, Neal? No hard feelings, I love you, man!), the fact remains that until you've worked with an individual animal for quite a while, your beat bet is to rely on its natural instincts. In this case, that means live prey until you get consistent feeding. If he wants to switch to f/t or pre killed later on, great. For now though, the last thing the OP needs to worry about is training this little guy to do something out of the ordinary (from a wild BP perspective). I understand where you're coming from, and I agree that if an animal will feed f/t consistently, there's no reason not to do that. Later, though.

To the OP, I've made two moron mistakes today. In this case, I completely blanked on dehydration being a possibility. HOWEVER... I still say go to a vet. If it is dehydration, that gets her on the road to health and contentment. If not, they're going to be able to figure out the problem and help you fix it.

Sent from my HTCEVOV4G using Tapatalk