Quick question about body condition/weight

[Bogertophis]

To be fair, knowing he was on rats wouldn't have negatively influenced me getting this snake, nor would it have deterred me from purchasing mice instead because mice is what he should be eating. I think my situation would have been pretty much the same, other than maybe I would have been less confused by the food refusal initially. The fact that he is a little pudge definitely eases my worries about his refusal so far.

Just FYI, I'm not willing to do live feedings (lots of reasons like, I don't know where to get them, I'm not willing to house an animal just for feeding purposes, it would be complicated if he refused the live mouse/I'm not willing to kill it myself in this case, there is no one else to feed it to because our other snake is too small, etc). I'd like, rather force feed than do live feedings, lol, although I strongly doubt that would happen in the future and am just using that as a comparison.

I'm going to try scenting, and will maybe just wait another couple weeks so he may be more willing to eat it.

Just wondering, though: Does a frozen rat still transfer its scent as well as a thawed one? Meaning, if I get one frozen rat from my friend, can I use it to scent several mice over a longer period of time instead of thawing the entire rat just to scent a mouse? Because then I'd just be wasting an entire rat for every mouse feeding. Or I could maybe divide the rat into pieces and just thaw parts of it for scenting, if the frozen rat's scent would not be as strong? Anyone have experience with this?

This sounds gross, but I'd even be more willing to make my own kind of rat "extract" than buying a bunch of rats to scent (maybe like heating one rat in some water and saving the water to scent the mice?). Only problem is, I don't know how long such an extract would last before it goes bad (unless I froze it?). Just a thought. I know you can buy scenting materials on sites like ReptiLinks, (they don't have rats, though), and I am guessing they make them in a similar fashion.

Fresh live rat has the most scent- frozen, not so much. If you can get some used (dirty) rat bedding (the more feces the better, lol) from a pet store, that should work quite well to roll the f/t mouse in prior to feeding. (better if the mouse is damp, to hold the scent "eau de rat") Plus you can re-use the dirty bedding.

Who knows what will ultimately work best in this case? Ya gotta do what you gotta do at this point- he's your snake now.