Quote Originally Posted by SoCaliSon View Post
I started stunning when I rescued a BP that was partially blind casue of badly capped eyes from poor husbandry. I wanted her to eat live... but she was at a disadvantage becasue of her sight... Now her eyes are all cleared up and she snipes active rats from almost 2 feet away. I have no prob feeding her active rats now considering she gets them right around the snout eachtime keeping there head bit shut, while she constricts.
As has been mentioned, but it's worth repeating again, ball pythons are not sight hunters. It would be pretty well useless to them to be sight hunters since their natural world deep in an wild rat burrow or in an african termite mound doesn't include much natural lighting in order to see their prey. There are studies out there that show that snakes with labial pits, as bp's have, are at a much greater disadvantage if their pits are inactive, but show almost no change in hunting pattern if their sight is impaired.

Quote Originally Posted by SoCaliSon View Post
I would think that in the big picture Evolution has proved that every animal behavior on planet earth is "use it or lose it". An animals behaviors and its means of living come from the environment around them and the most Basic Instict of all... Survival. If you take away an animals need to hunt... Eventually it will forget how to hunt. If you put a perfectly healthy person on a machine that breathes for them... And take them off of it 20 years later... Most likely they have lost touch with the preprogrammed part of our brain that tells us we need to breathe. Take a person who has been in bed for over a year... They need physical rehabilitation to be able to walk again, That is a muscualr and not a mental issue but may still apply. I have seen snakes fed only on F/T that eventually stop constricting... Why? Probably becasue they have learned they don't have to.

Anyway... The point I am getting at... Is animal instincts are programmed into them based on their needs for survival in the wild. Animals, ESPECIALLY CAPTIVE BRED, can loose touch with the preprogrammed behaviors if we take away the need for that behavior in the animals survival. Over time the captive animals will evelove in such a way that there will be a major difference from in the animal wild to captive. Look at dogs. These are animals that have drastically evolved from their basic inticts in the wild to life with humans. Every dog I ever owned couldn't hunt for a meal if it's life depended on it. Even though just a few generations back he would have been born a hunter. It doesn't take many generations to breed a behavior out of an animal.

Food for thought... I hope that makes some sense.
This is all pretty fascinating stuff, however, some points you've skipped over. Evolution doesn't work in a few short years. Ball pythons haven't been kept in captive situations in any way, shape or form long enough for us measly humans to affect their evolutionary process. To think we have done that, is to be very overly impressed with ourselves I think.

Also evolution is not the same as physical inactivity of muscle structure as in your patient in bed example. That's a function of illness or inactivity - not evolution.

Dogs again are a poor example since their changes were achieved through selective breeding for specific physical change suited to a job or look humans wanted for them. Ball pythons are not being selectively bred for major physical changes. A high priced morph BP is nothing more than a normal BP with a slightly fancier paint job. Under that skin is p. regius with all the instincts and abilities nature put there.

Now as far as prey, whether or not you care for rats as far as I'm concerned, they deserve the respect of a prey animal that is the sole reason you are not sitting on a computer talking about your dead snake. Provide the most perfect enclosure, provide water, bedding, whatever....without that prey item....you've eventually got one dead snake. The predator/prey dynamic is the single most important aspect and both parties to that dynamic deserve the respect due them (at least in my not always so humble opinion).

You don't have to make a huge deal over the rodents, but treating them inhumanely, disregarding their vital role both in captive and wild environments is to my mind, a very short sighted way to look at things.

As far as the original question, there is an in between place which for Mike and I never includes stunning. If the OP wishes to feed live they can always offer live in the form of a rat fuzzy that has no erupted teeth. With the work beforehand to ask about and study how to live feed successfully, pre-scenting the area, introducting a basically harmles live prey item and good monitoring there's no common sense reason it will not work. As the snake is observed it can be ascertained how efficient it's hunting methods are on live prey and a feeding program tailored to it's needs.

We do this with any snake we have that we do not have information on it's previous life (rescues, adoptions, etc.). It allows us to assess the situation and make informed decisions for the snake. It seems to be working since we've been live feeding quite a while now on quite a number of snakes from three different species and I've yet to see a problem.