Alright!!Nice constructive debate going... I agree with some of the points you make Gorilla... I just wanted to clarify a couple of things that may have been taken wrong.
First with the chewing analogy... I like to try to create comparisons in which people can directly relate to incease effectivness. We have teeth becasue chewing is the first step in the human digestive process. We all know snakes don't chew their food... Instead the first step for them in digesting is to contsrict to kill. We get our food ready to swallow by chewing... they do it by constricting. The analogy was meant to show that to feed f/t becasue your snake might get injured while contricting live prey, would be like somebody serving you perchewed food your entire life through a straw out of the danger you might chip a tooth while chewing. You could argue whether you blend a burger or eat it in bites you will get all the same stuff... But think about the mental effect that years of not being able to exercise your natural feeding behavior would have on you, Even if you were raised like that from birth and you never chewed a bite in your life. Not to mention long term physical muscular effects.
You said..."I agree that constricting is instinct, therefore, how could a snake forget or lose touch with it?"
Some snakes take F/T in the same way they would take a live rat... With attack... contriction... ingestion...
IMO if your snakes stops contricting it is time to start taking steps to get them back into the habit. Because the fact is that you CAN break an animal of it's intinctual behaviors, especially in captive bred animals. All you have to do is provide an environment where they do not need to exercise those behaviors for an extended amount of time. Put a perfectly healthy person a machine that breathes for them for years... Then take them off of it... Chances are they have lost touch eith the area of the brain that automatically tells you to breathe.
As far as the Vegetarian argument that is a whole different debate I will try not to get to far into. I will make just a couple points... The two pointy teeth in my mouth are obviously not there for chewing salad. While studying anthropolgy I learned that there was actually an early race of hominid dating back thousands of years that was entirely vegetarian... Wanna guess what happened??? They died off.
"There is no evidence or studies to support your claim of "degraded" nutrients in frozen food."
As far as nutrition goes... Everything I said above about the oxygenation level in the blood ... and the freshness of fluids in the tissue ... Those are all true. It is the same with the food we freeze for our own human consumption. With the features of the human body we can easily tell who is healthy and who maybe doesn't eat the best. Snakes are different. All we really look at to determine a snakes health is that it eats, that it sheds, and that it sh*ts. Does that mean that those are the only factors related to their health? A person fed junk food their entire life still eats, grows, and defecates... But that by no means does it say that the person is in good health. There is still a lot of research to be done as far as health and nutrition in snakes go, but to accept that you are doing everything right for your snake because it eats sheds and poops I think is falling short because a sickly or malnurished animal could do the same thing. There was a great point in the article i found ( I will post a link bellow)... But it was along these lines. Take your newborn baby to the doctor and tell him that you are planning on raising your baby on frozen food alone and they will call child protective services on you. Maybe a baby could survive on a frozen food diet...but would obviously would not be as healthy as if they were allowed to eat fresh food and who knows what kind of long term effects would be suffered. I think it is obvious... Fresh food will always offer more benifit than something frozen for an extended amount of time. It is even different in this case cause in frozen human food we have preservatives and additives that help offset what gets lost in freezing... Frozen Thawed Rats get nothing! The point is made... That if nothing is lost in Freezing food... Then why do the frozen food companies go through the extensive time and effort required to add these preservatives to our frozen foods?
Read this article from VMSHerp "http://www.vmsherp.com/LCLivevsFrozen.htm"... It has a lot of good info that should be considered. Most I have paraphrased above.
And once again... No hostility intended. I love these educated discussions.
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