While you can feed live, you have a risk. If that snake doesn't hit and coil right then the mouse/rats teeth are right there for free access. Yea this doesn't always happen, but it's always a risk. I have fed live to some that won't take f/t and what I do when I feed live is I keep my tongs right next to me so that if the rat goes to bite I can stop it before it happens. I of course would never leave a live animal in with the snake unsupervised, so I put the rat in there if it's not going to hit within a few minutes then chances are it's not going to eat, so the rat goes back out.

I was snake sitting a friends baby pied and come feeding day I went to feed it f/t, which it didn't take so I tried live which it seemed interested in but no go. Now I don't know why(may be a dominance thing) but Luke was telling me that sometimes if his snakes won't eat right off the bat, he'll hold them above the rat and they'll take it then. So I did this and sure enough the pied struck and coiled the rat pup. Now what I failed to realize and looking back I should of known that it was going to hold on to my hand/fingers while it did this to prevent itself from falling.

So fast forwarding a minute or two, it nailed the rat and picked him up while coiling, but it coiled the rat and somehow the rats mouth ended up by my finger and it bit the crap out of me. Not that it hurt, but for a rat pup, I sure as hell wasn't expecting that.

With all this being said, I prefer f/t because I'd rather not run the risk if I don't have to, plus I don't have to provide care for the rat as well as food. Now if I had 100+ snakes this may be different. Plus I don't breed, so cost wise it's much cheaper to do f/t.