switching to rats?

[wspeer]

any tips on switching to rats from mice, tomorrow is feeding day and i want to start feeding rats, any ideas or tips on how to make the tranition easy for my BP

[xdeus]

One trick that Adam Wysocki gave me was to add a little bit of mouse bedding to the snakes cage about 15 minutes before offering the rat. It worked great for me.

Keep in mind that every snake is different and older snakes tend to be a little more difficult to change over than a younger snake.

[tmlowe5704]

Also some people like to rub a mouse on their rats to leave some scent. Or try to put some dirty mouse bedding in an enclosure with a rat to leave some scent.

[frankykeno]

I'd say just make sure the rat is quite small, pup or other unweaned size, since your snake is used to dealing with a quite small prey item. You don't want to overwhelm it's hunting instincts or digestion with a sudden switch to a much larger prey item. Best of luck. We were able to switch a few of ours over to rats but some of them just won't look at a rat but snarf down mice like crazy. Also remember that bp's grow just fine on mice, at some point multiple mice so they don't have to switch to rats really.