I have my little girl, Alice who is a yellowbelly BP about 1.5 years old or so. She was adopted after being dumped in a nearby park, and came to me at 554g with her backbone sticking out, she's thin. I've dealt with underweight BP's before, but not a juvenile with no known history.

So fast forward to a feeding history that ended up looking like this:
first day: live mouse eaten ravenously
next feed : F/T small mouse, eaten
skip a feed, DNE (did not eat) F/T small rat
offer F/T mouse, DNE
offer F/T mouse again, DNE
skip 2 feeds after offering different size mice and rats, F/T, all DNE
try live rat, eaten
live rat, DNE
F/T small rat, DNE
skip 3 feeds, all DNE, offered 4 live mice out of desperation to get SOME kind of food in her belly and meat on her bones, every single one of them eaten. (this was last night, most recent feed)

as you can see this girl is allllll over the place. I'm not sure what her history is, but it's boggling to try to figure out what she wants.
since she took 4 live mice (it was more of an experiment, really and I was surprised when she took all 4 with no hesitation) I will be doing the same in 1.5 weeks. hopefully she will eat them.

my main concern is getting some weight on her bones. She's thin which could be part of her feeding problem, but I noticed she acts disgusted when she smells the rats, and has more interest in mice. Frozen mice is still hard to convince her to strike at. I just want her weight up and at this point i dont care how picky she is, whatever she will eat is what she will get until her weight is at a normal platform!

so now we know her basic history and apparent feeding habits, my biggest question is, how do I slowly and inconspicuously get her over to F/T rats? she's around 2 inches at her wides point, I know she should be eating rats and would get more nutritional content from one but as it stands shes a bit.... picky. hah.

my current idea is to take a F/T rat when im feeding my other girls and rub it allllll over the live mice for her, so she starts associating the musk of a rat with food. then if that works, do this with a F/T mouse and make it do the thriller dance to see if she falls for it, and feed her a live mouse first, followed up in the same feeding by the F/T one so hopefully she wont notice the difference. then if THAT works, try a small frozen rat with mouse scent rubbed allll over it, and go from there. this is going to be a very long and frustrating process, i can already tell. lol

sorry for my horrid spelling and grammar, believe my background in english is shaking its head at me but its morning and I haven't had my coffee yet. forgive me.

any thoughts, concerns, questions, songs, interpretive dances? How should I get this extremely picky eater to become a habitual pig who gobbles down whatever I give her? (like all my other girls are lol)