Posted by:
ginter
at Sun Jul 27 15:17:18 2008 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by ginter ]
Ok, I am somewhat bored with this topic but since it is getting recycled once again here goes with MHO, my "$0.02".......
I used to feed every snake I owned every week like clock work.....
What I found was more food = more crap and more food = more $$$$cost!
If your motive is to get an animal up to breeding size quickly so you can make money you are missing the point, you are a "snake farmer" and where is the fun in that?
If your motive is to have healthy happy animals, step back and watch for signals from the animals and use these to dictate feeding schedules. Young snakes need more food, reproductive females need more food, etc. I commonly have reproductive males that become anorexic for several months during the spring when finding females and breeding become the top mental focus.
I used to freak out about it but over time i realized that these guys do not eat all that often in the wild.
We receintly got the body wts of three (I know this is a small sample size but it is what we had) snakes. Two of these were long term wild caught captives that did not feed well prior to our getting them and the 3rd was a newly wild caught animal. They all looked thin from a snake keeper's perspective. They were all maintained under the same conditions and all fed readily on similar sized food items. We reweighed them 6 months later and I was a bit surprised. They all looked heavier and healthier at this time. The two long term captive WC animals gained a whopping 40+ % of their previous body wt! The "fresh" wild caught animal gained about 14% of her original body wt!
To me this means that she was closer to her normal or ideal body wt. in the wild even though she looked "thin" to me.
I was kind of off on a tangent so what this has to do with the original "powerfeeding topic" is unclear to even me! LOL
Personally, it comes down to selfishness for me, I can't afford to nor do I have the time to power feed. They are very efficent predators that simply crap out what they don't need. I skip feedings on some of my big snakes for weeks at a time and they don't loose weight!
Evaluate your motives and take it easy on the human imposed scheduling.
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RE: power feeding questions...... - ginter, Sun Jul 27 15:17:18 2008