Hi everyone! I'm a new snake owner and I'm getting a 6 year old Ball Python from my friend who can no longer care for him. He is 4.5 feet long and is a winter faster, but otherwise reliable eater, but she's been feeding him live medium rats. After doing my research, I'm noticing that feeding is a HUGE controversial topic so I'm looking at all my options. I would love to transition him to F/T, because I'm pretty sure he has some scarring on his back and don't really want to risk him getting into a fight with another rat. The other reason is because rats are very hard to come by in my town (f/t are available, just no live).

Problem is he has been eating live his whole life, and I know BPs are notorious picky eaters. My husband is also pro-live as his ball pythons he's had in the past all ate live (he's on team "enrichment", but is open to the safety of not feeding live rats)

So here's the question, is it safer to feed large mice? Do the pose less risk to the snake (obviously they would not be unsupervised and removed if the snake is uninterested). Would large mice give them the nutrition a rat would if they were getting the same grams over time? (i.e. two large mice instead of one medium rat). Has anyone fed multiple live rodents to a single snake for "one feeding", does it happen in the same day? Same hour? Or do you wait a couple of days? Obviously I wouldn't just drop two mice in the housing. I'm just trying to come up with a backup plan if this frozen rat plan totally doesn't go over well.

I don't usually see topics that go into this detail, as most people either know they feed live or f/t, and normally feeding two mice is a transition to feeding rats, so I'm just not sure what I should go forward with.