lol! Your experience with quirky little Milagro is comforting. I have an adult Jungle Carpet Python who will only take mice, though thankfully he is willing to take large ones. And yeah, if it turns out that the only way I can get this guy to eat is by feeding him piles of day-old quail, that is by gods what I will do. Or if he'll take live rodents, I'll just feed live or fresh killed or whatever.
I won't try the 'tough love' approach with this snake of just starving him until he caves and takes food. I'm not crazy about that method, though I have used it successfully on a couple of occasions when I felt that the snake involved was in sufficiently good condition to be able to handle an extended fast with no harm. But my instincts tell me that this snake would let himself starve and/or would let himself get to a point where he'd be vulnerable to opportunistic illness. I am just not willing to do that.
I've thought about whether or not he would survive in the wild. I suspect he would, as he has a prey drive and he'd be in an environment with live prey items of types his species has evolved to prefer rather than sitting in a PVC box with me shoving thawed quail at him. But all we can do is the best we can with them.
In a different group I got an interesting suggestion from a Colubrid importer who has had to persuade wild snakes to eat who just want exotic stuff like wild doves. He uses natural collagen-based sausage casings to tie a food item like a reptilink or a rodent to a piece of whatever the preferred food is, and gets the snake to take both that way.
I have some quail and quail/rabbit reptilinks here so I think I will try that with a reptilink attached to a day old quail. I should also be able to inject some Carnivore Care into the reptilink for a bit of an additional nutritional boost. Between that and trying live or fresh-killed I do have some hope.
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