` A healthy 9 foot female Green Anaconda can go for over a year, even more, without eating, and suffer no injury, and no permanent physical damage at all!!!

` Force feeding is highly traumatic to the snake. It can cause permanent physical, and behavioral damage.

` Sometimes, a sick or emaciated Boid must be force fed. I would estimate that 75% of the force feedings done are not necessary. They are done because the keeper needs the snake to eat, much more than the snake does.

` And yet, for years, I've watched people who were advised to be patient, instead kill or ruin a Boid that didn't need to eat yet, by ramming food down its throat!!

` If you concentrate on making an Anaconda comfortable, and happy, and consider what the snake needs to be happy, not what you need, it will almost always always come around.

` Boids are slow critters, in every sense. Sometimes a certain animal will take months to get used to a big change. It may feel insecure for quite a while. When they eat, they are at their most vulnerable. So, instinct tells them to wait to eat until they feel very secure.

Besides all that, if you go trying to force a 9 foot constrictor to do anything it doesn't want to do, you're liable to have quite a fight on your hands. A big fight, or too much restraint, can make a snake nasty, permanently. Not to mention physically injure it, and you.

` Also, I would not resort to live rodents, period.



` Of course that's just my opinion. I could be wrong. ( but not in this case )
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