I bought the hopper live when I first started trying to get my hatchling to feed. Since he missed the first couple of feeds, I had to kill the rodent and freeze it myself. It was in the freezer for about a month. I defrost it by submerging it in tepid-hot water for quite some minutes. It got warmed up a little with a hair dryer ... mostly to get some mouse scents in the air and my snake interested.