How Frequently Do You Feed Your BPs?

[SoCaliSon]

I appreciate your opinion and would like to agree with you, but honestly I do not believe my bp even knows the f/t I feed him are dead. My bp has been fed both live and f/t prey and has never rejected either. I would also like to say that in no way are you "forcing" your snake to eat when feeding f/t, unless you are using hemostats to force-feed which is a whole different issue.

And on the topic of constriction compared to chewing, well my bp strikes and constricts for 10 minutes every feed, so I don't see what activity he may be lacking from eating f/t.

I feed f/t because to keep live mice at my house is not an option because I have severe allergies. Besides that, I do not want to keep them, and to pick one up every week would be silly because I am in the country and would have to drive 45 minutes to get live mice. I am also not bashing anyones opinions and totally agree with those who choose to feed live, but don't jump the gun on those that feed f/t.

I didn't want to seem like I was jumping the gun on people who feed F/T...I completely believe that it is up to the keeper to make the educated decision on which method is best for them and their snake. Please Know.. No knocking intended as I respect yours and all the other members opinions regardless of how they feed. I made the chewing analogy because someone had posted above that they fed their snake F/T and now it doesn't even constrict it's food anymore. Feeding F/T works fine for a lot of people... But personally if my snake stop constricting I would worry and start slowly weening them back to live. That is where that analogy came from. I live walking distance to where I buy my rats so luckily I don't have to worry about keeping them here...

I have seen a lot of cases where the snake will not take F/T the first shot... It happens a lot to people trying to switch a snake over. When it doesn't take... they don't turn around and offer live. They continue to offer F/T until the snake finally takes it... sometimes weeks later. Why?... who really knows... but I would be willing to bet it was hunger and lack of the food they were looking for. It is not force feeding by definition, but if i refused something and was offered that item and that 1 item only until I caved to eat it from hunger or lack of options..I would consider that being forced to eat it. What would happen if a person bought a bulk F/T pack... and the snake refused to eat it for weeks on end?? I would be willing to bet that before we would see a live rat we would see the hemostats come out.

I apologize if that seemed cynical in any way... and know That I am completely aware that there are plenty of happy F/T pounding snakes out there. What I described above is only an issue SOMETIMES...But I mention it because that is my single biggest issue with F/T. If a snake readily takes f/t and can't tell the difference then hey... I see nothing really wrong with it if that what you want to do. But don't starve a snake until he decides to take dead prey... That is simply breaking a creature of it's natural instincts.