I don't know about you but I'm not ever going to try to replicate the wild. Very few snakes survive past maturity and can reproduce and food isn't stable. I don't agree with feeding a 25 gram mouse daily instead of weekly but I do agree with feeding 5 gram mice 5 days a week.
Replicating the "wild" and following a pattern of evolution are two separate entities.
Feeding an animal the way it should be fed based on scientific studies of the said animal's physiology is not replicating the wild.
As I stated earlier, captivity is a different bag of tricks, but it DOES NOT change millions of years of evolution.
Elephants in captivity are not fed meat because they don't eat meat in the wild. They are fed a diet that would resemble their natural diet. A diet they have evolved to handle.
Feeding in that manner does not replicate the "wild" as your statement suggests.
Feeding a snake in a manner that replicates what it is biologically developed to handle is simply common sense.
Not only did JM's podcast link cover this, the link I provided does as well.
Boas and pythons may not be the same species as you pointed out.
Fair enough, but they do display convergent evolution.
Knowing that, one can surmise that not only are their hunting techniques similar, so are their reptilian digestive traits.
If ball pythons were designed to eat daily, they would have evolved to be constantly foraging predators. They are NOT.
They are ambush predators that depend on seasonality and the breeding and migration patterns of other animals.
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