Boas will NOT eat as much as you give them

[Sauzo]

Well, to correct a couple points. Even a heavily power fed boa will not get a foot thick. For that kind of girth, you are talking pythons like a female mainland retic or female burm. In the boids, you would be talking an anaconda.

And even with an anaconda, they take a long time to grow as well being a boid.

As for a boa reaching 10+ ft, i have never seen a 10 ft boa. Biggest i have seen have been 8-9 ft and those were old females. You got to remember, a boa grows fast if fed heavily its first year or two. After that they slow down a lot so if you keep that power feeding up, all it is going to do is pack on the fat around the organs and then create really thick fat rolls on the snake. It will get thicker but only to an extent. it's just like underfeeding or stunting a snake to keep it small will only make it so small, you cant stunt a female mainland retic into being a 4 ft ball python lol. The same goes for overfeeding, you cant turn a 6-7 ft male BCI into a 12-13 ft burm. All the overfeeding will do is make the snake so obese, that it has a heart attack or liver failure and dies before even reaching 10 years old.

And why cant you do things differently now? Just because the snake has been overfed now doesnt mean the problem cant be corrected and the snake could still live a happy life. Traveling down the overfeeding road, you are just shortening that boas life with each meal. At least if you correct it now, you can stop the damage from continuing. You act like, the feeding schedule for a boa is set in stone once you begin feeding it. A lot of breeders actually cycle their boas during the winter with no food and lower temps to condition them for breeding. I personally have my snakes in an eternal summer as i dont cycle as i have been told cycling females can make them start to produce follicles for breeding which i dont need. i do usually give them smaller meals though in the winter and bigger meals in the summer. My point is it's never too late to correct the feeding problem and honestly, it is YOUR responsibility as the owner since the animal depends on you to take good care of it so it has a nice happy long life.

And as for live feeding, well that is your decision. I personally feed all my boas FT as i dont want to have to kill rabbits, quails, chicks, rats and mice. Not that I'm against it but i would have to make a CO2 chamber large enough for them and thats just more work. Plus FT is much more readily available and can be stored in a freezer. And the most obvious reason is that i dont want a rabbit or large rat biting my boa. the vet is already expensive enough with checkups. i dont need to add treatment of a rat or rabbit bite to the bill lol. Also freezing prey kills a lot of parasites which feeding live doesnt and can transfer parasites to the snake. That is why i have been told, if you feed live, you should take a fecal in once a year to get a float done on it.

And i know all about messy eaters lol. My sunglow grabbed her rat by the head and then used her body to pull it and literally ripped the stomach open and guts were hanging out. luckily it was on top of a hide so i washed it off easily. And Caesar grabbed his jumbo rat a couple weeks ago by the stomach and with male retics having long teeth, he must have punctured it as there was blood ALL over him and the cage floor. i ended up having to give him a bath after a few hours and cleaning up the blood area in the cage. Luckily Caesar is a lush and loves attention so he was happy to sit in the bucket with his head on the edge of it while i scrubbed him with a wet paper towel.

Bottom line is the stuff you are doing now while incorrect are nothing that cant be fixed easily. And the live feeding, like i said, i dont do it but its not incorrect, just runs more risks than FT and imo doesnt offer any benefits over it.