I think live feeding has its place, but must always be supervised...and the owner has to accept the risk of injury to the snake, or worse. Early only I also fed live, back in 1991 not many folks were talking about prekilled or frozen thawed. After having my female Colombian redtail get bitten by a feeder and the subsequent infection and antibiotic injections, I switched to prekilled. Not fun and not always pretty or clean. You get better with practice.
A few years of prekilling the prey, and I start hearing about frozen thawed rodents. I made the switch for convenience and significant cost savings over prekilling. I had very little trouble switching my animals over. In 27 years of keeping snakes, at least 18 of those years have been feeding f/t. There has been the occasional snake that only ate live prey at first, but they were eventually switched over to prekilled then f/t. Currently one of my baby balls is still eating live fuzzies. I have a sub-adult bp that I got Labor Day weekend that is still refusing to feed. She’s maintaining weight, so I’m not too worried yet. She was said to have already been on f/t, so I’m not looking to backtrack to live if I can help it.
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