This is a similar conversation to one I was having with some coworkers about my snakes recently. I had purchased what was supposed to be a captive bred Solomon Island ground boa eating live mice. Ummm, not so much. After the show and well after the sale, I reached out to the vendor due to feeding issues. Discovered he was wild caught and preferred geckos. Great. I purchased a gecko, which was left in the same enclosure. Didn’t eat the gecko. Over time I fed him house geckos with very limited success. I also rubbed live pinkies on the gecko...stressful for the pinkies and the gecko...also with limited success. Eventually discovered that he would eat fuzzy/hopper field mice. For a couple of years my Mom raised field mice for my snake...wild caught field mice from the Home Depot where she worked, where we luckily captured a pair.Originally Posted by Bogertophis
On a similar note, a friend had a hatchling king that wouldn’t eat rodents. We kept the shed skins from my hatchling corns and stuffed the pinkies into little cut tubes of shed skin. It worked like a charm and we were eventually able to stop using the sheds. All this to say, if you use chicken bedding or feathers, or rub the rat sufficiently on the preferred prey item, you can often wear down their resistance if you aren’t willing to let your snake go without food until it decides its hungry enough to eat what is on offer. And I do understand the reluctance to wait on the feeding response to kick in, especially during my early years of snake keeping and having snakes on a feeding strike. It can be nerve racking...as I’ve recently experienced with my hatchling lemonblast.
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