Is it time for bigger food

[Artemisace]

Do you all find that hunger behavior is associated with handling bites? Not food mistakes, but out of the cage normal handling unprovoked striking? I have always "hook" trained him even though up until now he's never actually shown any sort of food response when I open the cage I still boop gently with a paper towel tube before handling – this worked last week and the other day when he actually was acting hungry and I took him out anyway. So I guess I have a 100% success rate so far but with only two trials I'm not exactly ready to publish. So far Irwin has been the tamest and most passive pet I've ever had, reptilian or otherwise – but as I mentioned, it has been just over half a year so there may be aspects of his "personality" that I have not experienced yet.

As far as bites "associated" with hunger behavior, I've only ever had that happen with my larger snakes. I took a hit from my anaconda because she could smell food and decided my thumb looked like a rat. Not gonna lie it hurt, a lot, she has an incredibly strong bite. Other than that I've never been bitten in a situation like that, I have a couple snakes that are just jerks and bite me every now and then. My male banana being the biggest culprit of the this, the pretty little butt face. But the boas have never bitten me, given I haven't had them for as long, but in my experience so far, bites like that tend to happen early if they are going to happen. Hook training is a good thing because it gets them used to a pattern, with my tiger retic I used to have I would tap on his cage when I was going to clean or handle him and not when I was going to feed him. He learned that routine incredibly quick and I never had any issues with him. I would still try him on a medium and see if that calms him down a bit, they go through growth spurts from time to time and during that period they use phenomenal amounts of energy. My big female pastel ball python is going through one right now and is just decimating large rats every week. I might move her to a large and a small just to satisfy her because she's getting somewhat cage aggressive, we are also moving towards breeding season so that could be part of it as well and both my girls turn into bottomless pits for at least the next two months.

My point though is exactly what several others have said, there is no harm in giving it a shot. I'm not going to tell you to get a large and feed it to him because that wouldn't be a good idea based on the size of him I can see in those pictures. But go get a smaller medium and see how he looks after eating it and go from there.