F/t or live?

[cchardwick]

HA! I was the same way when I first started with one snake and a rat that the snake wouldn't eat, ended up with a pet rat. Even had a rat pinky that I tried to feed with infant formula LOL. Now I have a rat rack with 20 tubs and about a hundred rats in there at any one time. It automatically feeds and waters the whole rack, don't even have to mess with it for days and the rats are all happy. If I don't feed my old breeders off to my retics after a year or so they die of old age, and the mice are too old to breed after 8 months and rarely live past a year since their life span is so short. And when I first started out I decided to go with all albino mice since it was hard to feed off the fancy colorful mice, I would get attached. Not so with all albinos. And the albinos can have up to 16 babies, not bad for a mouse! I found the fancy mice would only have 6-8 babies max.

I was in the same dilemma, feeding F/T seems so much more humane. But then which is worse, feeding live or having a snake that won't eat for half a year? I prefer to feed fresh kill, gassed with CO2. But if the snakes won't eat I'll go for the live option, especially if I can get them all to eat prior to breeding season.

I was actually dropping in the live rats and waiting 20 minutes yesterday and today, seems like that's way too long. I'm going to cut back to 10 minutes. My female pieds didn't eat for six months and then I switched to live and fed one snake three medium rats in two days! And the other one took two rats! It's good to see my snakes finally eating again. If I knew they would eat live I would have beefed them up months ago, they have been at 1200 grams for almost a year now, just shy of the minimum 1500 grams. I'm sure in the next month or two they will be up to the proper weight for breeding.

I just bought a female normal het caramel albino ball python that's about 3500 grams, she was actually about 300 grams less than the posted weight, I figured that the breeder just didn't feed her for a long time. That monster of a snake ate five medium rats in just two days! I'm going to pack some weight on her and have some exciting breeding plans for her this year with one of my high end males, should be an exciting project!! She is going to be my 'garbage disposal' for medium rats since my retics outgrew the job. I'll try to feed my other ball pythons a fresh kill and if they don't take it I'll feed it to this monster normal girl. Then I'll backfill with a live feeding.