Honest opinions on feeding.

[MarkS]

I am interested in hearing your opinions on this subject when it comes to feeding the larger snakes. Surely one would think the risk would go up quite a bit when the prey in question is an adult bunny? I would think it would make things quite a bit riskier for the keeper too.

I only keep a couple of burms that I've had for about 10 years so haven't gone through as many feeders as I have with the balls. I've fed rats both live and frozen/thawed. It didn't seem to make any difference, when feeding rats they hit their food so fast and hard that the rat didn't even have a chance to blink. I generally just feed frozen/thawed because it's easier for me. I've tried rabbits but the burms didn't even recognize them as food. I've never tried a live rabbit but can't see that they'd do anything but ignore it. The last time I tried feeding a rabbit to one of my burms I actually used a needle strung with dental floss to sew a dead rat onto the head of a dead rabbit (yup, it was pretty gross). The burm grabbed the rat and started swallowing it, when the rabbit got up to the burms mouth it stopped swallowing and sat there for like about 5 minutes. Then the burm put a coil around the rabbit and started pulling hard. I could hear the pop as the dental floss pulled through the head of the rabbit. Then the burm finished swallowing the rat and just left the rabbit laying there. It was the weirdest thing I think I've ever seen a snake do. Since then I just feed 2-3 jumbo rats a piece and don't even bother with rabbits.