Dave,

...Lots of good info there.

...I have never had to force feed a normal baby Brazilian Rainbow Boa. If they are born defect free they all eat. I do wonder if my cooler temperatures may be the difference in never having to force feed a normal baby. Many times I have had people email with feeding problems with baby BRBs and often they are keeping them in the 80s and dropping temperatures into the 70s gets them eating. I have had some with birth defects (missing an eye or having a spinal kink or an oddly shaped head) that would not eat but I do not assist or force feed them. I offer them food and if they eat I give them or sell them at low price to people looking for a pet only animal. If they do not eat they end up in the freezer.

...I never mess with tieing up umbilicals. If the snake is born with lots of yolk material I leave them alone and try to let them absorb as much as possible before they start crawling around. Sometimes the mother snake moving around will bother the babies and they will crawl and break umbilicals that still have lots of yolk material attached. These often bleed but the bleeding usualy quickly stops and the end result seems to be good. I have had some with larger and thicker umbilicals and they have not caused any problems. They dry up and fall off like the thin umbilicals but take longer. Their umbilical wounds are usually a little larger but they heal up quickly. I have had a few with really large abnormal messy looking umbilical wounds and I am usually amazed at how quickly and how well they heal.

...I raise rats and almost always have pinky rats available for first meals. A very high percentage of most litters will eat live pinky rats whenever I offer them for the first time. Many eat their first day. A few will not take them and get offered a week later and many then take them. A small percentage refuse pinky rats and I get live hopper mice for them. Many that waited for a live hopper mouse for the first meal take a live pinky rat with no hesitation a week later. I do not put much effort into changing them over to dead prey. They almost all change over eventually but I sell many of them while they are still on live. I get a better feeding response and higher percentage of them eating when feeding live. I want them to eat and grow and would rather they eat a live meal than refuse a dead one. If I can get them all (or at least most of them) fed with one pass thru the cages changing paper towels and putting pinky rats in and another pass an hour later recording their meals the feeding job is easy and fairly quick.

Jeff

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