Feeding mice/ rats to breeders

[cchardwick]

Are you talking about live or frozen thawed mice and rats? I started breeding my own mice, rats, and African soft fur rats. Had a few babies from the African soft furs and mice but none are big enough to feed yet, still about a month away. Right now I'm still buying live mice from the pet store, about 6 at a time for my 6 ball pythons. Now that they are on live mice they seem to each much better than when I tried to feed them frozen thawed, some of them I can even sneak in a second f/t feeding right after the live mouse. Now that I'm feeding live mice none will ever skip a meal, even in full shed. I have some pretty young / small snakes and already they can take a full size adult mouse with a very noticeable buldge in their belly. Once your snake gets bigger you'll for sure want something bigger like a rat. And most pro breeders feed their females medium to large live rats just before breeding season to make sure all their females are eating and gaining weight fast. I would imagine feeding mice to a full size ball python takes a lot more effort since you'd have to feed multiple mice (too many to even be worth it), keep the mice for the hatchlings. I also have some king snakes as well, mice are perfect for those guys and the snakes will never outgrow an adult mouse like a ball python. If I were you I'd try African soft fur rats instead of mice, they won't get bigger than what your largest ball python can eat like a rat, and they have almost no smell at all. Once male mouse is going to smell up your place pretty bad, I'm thinking of eventually getting out of the mice and sticking with ASFs and rats. Of course if you are buying frozen or live rodents, just enough to feed that week, you won't have to worry about the rodent breeding thing.