Snake Talk: Why I Don't Feed Live

Last night for me was not a typical Friday night for most. While many of my friends were hitting up the bars, chilling at house parties, or catching up on sleep, I was standing over my bathroom sink, holding a blow dryer over a previously frozen dead mouse in order to make his coat warm and fluffy.

The glamorous life of a Snake Mama.

Ball pythons are well known for being finicky eaters, and damn, does my sweet Prometheus fit the bill. In the five months I’ve had him, he’s eaten a grand total of five times. He hasn’t eaten once since we moved to BG. By all accounts, he’s happy and healthy and content, but he just does not feel like eating. Not only is it irritating, but I feel terrible, because I’ve had to throw away countless meals he turned up his little white nose at; mice whose deaths were wasted. But I think of it as food that I let spoil in the fridge; it sucks, but it happens. Only instead of a few chicken breasts, I have a bag full of frozen mice.

Not many people support the idea of the rodent holocaust I currently have in my freezer. Some openly condemn it.

“Why don’t you feed live? It’s natural, and besides, it’s cool!” is the most common thing I get from people when they learn that I feed Prometheus FT (frozen thawed) food. And I know that the friends/blog commenters/snake enthusiasts that say that mean well, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to backhand them. It’s not because I don’t respect their viewpoint on the matter (though I don’t, sorry, not sorry), it’s just that I’ve heard it countless times in my years of snake ownership.

This post started as a reply to the beginning photo I posted on my Facebook wall, but it got so big and so detailed that I decided to make a blog post out of it. So, my invisible/imaginary followers, this is why I feed Prometheus—and any snake I have owned in the past and will in the future—frozen thawed prey instead of live.

Starting with a big fat DISCLAIMER: Many snakes, for whatever reason, will only eat live prey. In the herpetology lab at BGSU, for example, we started all hatchlings on FT, but there are a handful of snakes there who are problem feeders and will eat nothing but live. I totally get that. I will not own a snake like that. Prometheus’s finicky eating is not due to the fact that he eats FT. He’s eaten FT all his life. He’s just a picky eater so typical of ball pythons. There is also nothing medically wrong with him. Not really relevant to the discussion, but it’s always important to know that about your pets.

Now I’ll get my personal reasons out of the way, and I’m sorry if this sounds snide, but I’ve gotten shit for so long on this subject. First and foremost, aside from my love of Jackass and the like, I absolutely cannot handle suffering on any level (and I don’t see that as a weakness.) I am especially upset by animal cruelty and suffering, to the point where if it’s in a movie or a TV show, there’s a good chance I’ll shut it off, or at the very least skip the part. You’re talking to the girl who won’t kill bugs that end up in her house. It’s just the way I am. I cherish life on many levels. Were it not for a few issues, I’d probably be a vegetarian. FOR THE RECORD—I don’t condemn or disrespect people who do not share this worldview.

Now for the less personal reasons. I hate the “it’s natural!” argument, because it’s the number one reason people cite for giving me shit about this. Number one, 100% of the time, these people don’t give a shit if “it’s natural”, or they’d be making their cats and dogs hunt for their food, and they’d be running around naked and living in caves and shunning technology. They just think it’s cool to watch a snake eat live. That’s fine. Lots of people do. I’m not one of them. Two, the “it’s natural!” argument kind of falls apart when you look at the fact that you are keeping a snake in an enclosure that you maintain, and that you handle said snake in your hands, around your shoulders, and on your floor all the time, and that you provide said “natural” food by dropping it into their tank or feeding enclosure. In other words, fucking owning a snake throws “natural” out the window. You want your ball python to live “naturally?” Release it in Africa.

Sorry, that got snarky. Moving on to the less bitchy and more sciency reasons I feed FT.

PRACTICALITY: The typical owner of a live feeding snake takes a weekly venture to the local pet store, buys a single feeder mouse/rat, takes it home, and drops it into their snake’s tank. I open my freezer. I buy FT rats (well mice, currently) at reptile shows, usually in bags of 10 or 20 for about $20-30. Most snakes eat once a week, my picky Prometheus, even less so. I just cut 10 or 20 weekly trips to the local pet store from my life.

Though the vast, vast majority of casual snake owners go to the pet store for their food, there are breeders and hobbyists with collections that buy their live feeder rodents at reptile shows, like I buy my FTs. These shows often only happen once a month, so these owners will buy in bulk and feed/care for the rats throughout the month. Still others choose to breed their own feeder rodents. Now, I couldn’t do this not just for practical reasons, but because I just don’t have it in me to raise and care for something and then kill it. Count me out as a farmer, I guess. But cutting that personal part out of it, God damn, it would be a major pain in the ass to care for feeder rodents, not to mention the expense. Many do it because of the safety risks in pet store mice (I’ll get to that), and I totally understand that. But that’s quite a bit of extra work an expense, and yet another reason I won’t personally own a live feeding snake.

SAFETY: This is a major, major reason many breeders and hobbyists feed FT to their collections. First and foremost, the vast majority of casual snake owners get their snake’s food from pet stores. We’ve all heard of puppy mills, which are terribly inhumane, disease-ridden places from which pet store puppies come (DON’T BUY FROM PETLAND). Well, all pet store animals come from places like that, and though they don’t get the media attention that puppy mills do, they’re equally inhumane and unsafe. I’d NEVER buy a ball python from a pet store, and I won’t buy my ball python’s food there, either. Rodent mills produce mass amounts of feeder rodents in the worst possibly conditions that are not only cruel, but unsafe. Pet store feeder mice/rats often come home riddled with diseases and are generally poorly bred to boot (meaning they’re essentially snake “junk food”). There are plenty of snakes that are fed a diet of pet store feeder rodents and are perfectly fine and lead healthy lives, but I wouldn’t recommend the practice to anyone looking to own a snake. I give Prometheus the best I possibly can because I love the little bastard and want him to live a long time. The FT rodents I purchase are from a lab that specializes in only that. The rodents are healthy, well fed, well bred, and kept in humane conditions. Sort of like free range chickens, I guess.

Another note on safety is that live rodents often can and do fight back. They’re alive…live things tend to want to stay that way. Many snakes are enthusiastic feeders who immediately strike and constrict their prey upon seeing it, so there isn’t much of an issue. In the battle of rat vs snake, snake tends to win. However, if your snake isn’t terribly hungry that day, or strikes and misses, or the rat somehow gets an edge, which happens, then your snake’s food has the potential to do some serious damage. Snakes have lost eyes, sustained bites and gashes, and even died due to rodent attacks. Again, this doesn’t always happen, and when it does, it’s more often than not because the feedings were unsupervised, which is a terrible misstep for some snake owners who choose to feed live. I almost included a link to a few stories about rat attacks, but the images were horrifically graphic and I couldn’t handle it. I trust you guys to do your own research, especially if you disagree with me on these points. I’m not writing this to start some sort of campaign. Anyway, as Prometheus is a finicky eater, it is very likely that a live rodent could injure him, and there’s no way I’m risking that.

There are many ways to feed a snake, and as much as my snark seeped into this discussion, I don’t hold live feeding against anyone. A troupe mate and fellow snake enthusiast of mine feeds all three of her ball pythons live, and I don’t condemn her for it, nor do I call her a sadist. That’s her choice, and that’s how her snakes prefer to eat. She’s a conscientious Snake Mama who consistently takes her babies to the vet and monitors their health and attitudes. And she feeds live. I am a conscientious snake Mama and I adore my legless baby with all my little black heart, and I feed FT. Neither way is the wrong way, so long as you’re responsible, careful, and caring.

 

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