Quote Originally Posted by kc261 View Post
I personally would not feed it off. I don't think it would have anything that could make your snake sick; most illnesses can't cross species, or at least not 2 species that are so different.

However, it if is not well, then it won't be the best nutrition for your snake. Especially if you give it a chance to get well, then feed it off once it is too far gone... some of the nutrition will have "gone" too. As you already pointed out, one rat isn't worth much, so you aren't really losing anything, and are protecting the well-being of your snake.

If you aren't going to take it to a vet (which I totally understand your point about not being worth it financially, I might make the same decision), just put it down whenever you figure is appropriate, giving it a chance to get well but don't leave it in misery when it obviously has no hope of recovery. And then dispose of it.
I completely agree with you on this.

Mike and I breed our own rats. The reason we do all that extra work is to provide a better and more consistent quality of prey and to make it more cost effective for us. I don't see the point in feeding a really sick rat to one of our snakes. For me it defeats one of the main reasons we maintain our own rat colony.

To euth and discard an obviously sick rat isn't going to cost me big bucks but to offer it as food, when I know it isn't in good condition, seems to me to be giving our snakes less than the best. I'm just not willing to do that.

If the rat is culled when it is still in a reasonable condition, that's one thing but a rat that's down, that's lost body mass or has an obvious big tumor - that's just not a rat that qualifies as a top quality feeder for our snake collection.