Your snake will probably not get bitten, scratched and scarred from a dead rat or whatever. This is pretty well confirmed in most scientific circles. You can put the rat in a jar and it will die from carbon dioxide poisoning pretty quickly, and relatively painlessly. If you monitor it, you can feed it to your snake while still naturally warm. If cold, and your snake prefers warm prey, you can put the rat in a jar of hot water, or hold it in front of a little space heater. Given the bad injuries that often happen to snakes due to prey, there's no excuse for feeding live prey. If you care about your snake, you won't feed it live prey. If you are one of those sickos who enjoys the killing act, you are beyond help and either need an IQ boost or other mental help. Plus, even though snakes, of course, kill in the wild, it is often not pretty or painless to the prey. Sorry for the sacrcasm, but really, this should be a dead and long ago resolved issue. I suppose newcomers to snake keeping accepted.

[ Hide Replies ]

• Live prey items??? - rich-k, Wed Mar 17 09:49:39 2004
• RE: Live prey items??? - Raven01, Wed Mar 17 14:55:49 2004
• RE: Live prey items??? - athos_76, Wed Mar 17 16:31:37 2004
• I used to think the same way...... - Raven01, Thu Mar 18 09:13:35 2004
• RE: I used to think the same way...... - rich-k, Thu Mar 18 12:06:42 2004
• RE: I used to think the same way...... - CaptainHook2, Thu Mar 18 12:32:16 2004
• RE: I used to think the same way...... - rich-k, Fri Mar 19 09:32:11 2004
• RE: I used to think the same way...... - CaptainHook2, Fri Mar 19 11:09:45 2004
• RE: I used to think the same way...... - rich-k, Fri Mar 19 19:34:48 2004
• I used to also until... - Sybella, Thu Mar 18 21:28:25 2004
• So what did you do.... - AnacondaKeeper, Fri Mar 19 20:19:49 2004
• RE: So what did you do.... - toddbecker, Fri Mar 19 22:00:53 2004
• RE: So what did you do.... - lilroach56, Sat Mar 20 17:45:45 2004
• Parasites and bacteria are two very different things. np - Sybella, Sat Mar 20 22:04:09 2004
• thanks for pointing that out np - lilroach56, Sun Mar 21 17:56:43 2004
• RE: So what did you do.... - karizmaflip, Fri Apr 2 13:06:59 2004
• RE: So what did you do.... - Sybella, Fri Mar 19 23:05:34 2004
• RE: Live prey items??? - rsalib, Wed Mar 17 18:48:48 2004
• RE: Live prey items??? - CaptainHook2, Thu Mar 18 12:12:48 2004
• Feeding Live for your enjoyment is immature and irresponsible? - toddbecker, Thu Mar 18 17:03:53 2004
• RE: Feeding Live for your enjoyment is immature and irresponsible? - CaptainHook2, Fri Mar 19 11:03:55 2004
• From your posted picture, I'd say your snake is just right. : - ) np - Sybella, Fri Mar 19 23:15:39 2004
• Solved.... - AnacondaKeeper, Fri Mar 19 20:34:46 2004