7-month feeding strike and counting

[Zincubus]

This post is not about any of my snakes; I'm posting out of concern for a friend, so if that isn't OK just delete this post and accept my apologies.

He has a female BP that's 4 years old; she was a regular feeder on F/T rats until 7 months ago and has not taken a meal in that time. His husbandry (temps/humidity/enclosure/handling and environmental stressors) has been good. She's lost just a slight amount of weight; she's been taken to an exotics vet for fecal analysis and bloodwork and declared healthy.

He has tried offering live prey and ASF with no success. He moved her into a different (larger) enclosure with new substrate with no success. She's now back in her original enclosure as he feels she acts more comfortable there. He's offering food every 3-4 weeks, and she is rarely handled because they are trying to keep stress to a minimum.

Unfortunately about 5 months into her food strike he decided to take her to her breeder (a local reptile shop owner) to see if they could get her to eat. In the process, a pet store employee stole her and sold her to someone else. She was retrieved within 24 hours, but of course the whole sequence of events meant a lot of being moved around and stressed. She's been back with her owner since then. Last week he felt that her behaviors indicated she might be hungry, but she wasn't interested.

Personally I feel like he just needs to ride it out with her. She's a big snake (she's half Volta) and hasn't lost much weight - her last vet visit was recent and she was given a clean bill of health. But he's really starting to lose hope and says that he thinks he's going to wake up any day now to a dead snake.

So I thought I'd post here to see if there are any other suggestions. All I can think of at this point is to maybe try offering a chick or a live gerbil, but my overall sense of things is that he just needs to wait and try not to freak out.

Soooooo ... my huge Male Pied went on a 15 ( fifteen) month fast and was still active and perfectly healthy ..

I tried tempting him with an array of thawed goodies over that period - mice , rats , day old chicks , hamsters , multimates , baby rabbit , quails and guinea pigs .

I kinda gave up worrying after a while but one day after offering two thawed chicks that were refused ( as usual) I decided to offer them to my Corn snakes but cut the heads / beaks off before offering to them .

For some bizarre reason I placed the two chick heads in a dish back on with the Pied royal ... he’d scoffed them both by the next morning !!

He’s been eating two thawed chicks every feed ever since .. won’t eat anything else though ..


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