Thanks for the reply.

1. Yeah, I figured that time would differ for different snakes. I was meaning, should I expect snakes to take up 10 or 15 minutes to give up on trying to spit it out of their mouth and then decide to swallow it? I know that it is really stressful, and I wanted to minimize the stress as much as possible. So the only thing that I seemed to help was to allow the snake a few minutes to see if he was going to swallow on his own. If he didn't and tried to spit it out, I tried to "walk" the mouse a bit further down.

2. Keeping one of them straight proved to be almost impossible. They coiled back on them selves and folded their bodies over when I was trying to force feed them. Once they flexed their neck muscles, the prey item wasn't budging.

I tried to carefully hold their head with my thumb and index finger and the rest of the body with my ring and little fingers. It almost seems you would need a second pair of hands to help.

3. Thanks of the info. I used water as lubricant to help the prey slide in the snakes mouth. I was using small fuzzy mice. I'll try braining the mice next time to see if that helps. I noticed the only snake to assist feed was the last one, whose mouse was really soft (from being in the water that long). It opened up when I was inserting it...maybe this is why the snake at it with less effort.

W. Smith

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