>>...The poor rodent doesn´t even have a chance of trying to bite cause he doesn´t even know what hit him..

Until that one time the mouse happens to see it coming or gets stuck on a fang or any of a dozen other things that "will never happen" happens. Biting 10 times just means 10 times as many chances for something to go wrong.

I used the rattler as an example for two reasons:
1) They are faster than cobras (striking)
2) That didn't keep something totally unexpected from happening. This wasn't a hungry mouse left in the cage overnight, it was ticked at being bitten and went to war.

And just to be clear, I don't have any kind of moral objection to feeding live prey. I feed pre-killed because it is safer for the snake AND easier for me. I feed live to anything that I have problems getting to eat dead. I have, on occasion, fed live now and then just to see or demonstrate the venom effects to someone else. I don't do that often enough to worry much about the chances of something going wrong.

If you're willing to take that chance, and you don't mind the possibility of an injury now and then, that's fine. It's a chance the snake would be taking in the wild, so arguing that it's WRONG for you to feed live doesn't make much more sense than the people who say you shouldn't keep snakes at all because it's somehow cruel to feed one animal to another. But argueing that it won't happen, because you haven't seen it happen yet is like those guys that free-handle their gaboons. No matter how many times they have seen something NOT happen, it doesn't change the one time I HAVE seen it happen.

(And no, I've never SEEN a cobra lose an eye to a mouse since I've never even seen someone feed live to a cobra, but I have had almost the same discussion with people who own boas. "He always grabs them so fast they don't know what hit them." Those boas with mangled noses that come into our refuge come from somewhere...)

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