I raise my own feeders and have used several methods:

1) Whack em, as stated is fairly common but can be messy.

2) Break the neck, Works well on small to med but hard to do with larges. Also, even with smaller, I've had a few where the tail skin just came off. Now you have a rat, maybe not dead, with no covering on it's handle.

3) Gas em, never tried this, not sure how I would decide how many to gas at a time. My wife said H$!! no to rats in the freezer and to be honest, I wholeheartedly agree.

4) Choke em, a new method I figured out recently. I have a pair of large hemostats, probably about 14 or 16 inches in length. I select my feeders from the racks in the garage and put them into a small critter keeper (the small plastic terrarium commonly sold in pet stores). In the snake room, I use these hemostats to remove the individual rodents. I use the hemostats to grab a selected rodent by the neck, clamping down so it can't breathe. Can't be worse than what the snake would do to live prey. It will gasp and convulse for a short period, when it relaxes, I release the rodent and regrasp it by the tail....off to wiggle the now dead rodent in front of the next to feed snake. I feed my snakes from smallest to largest and always save my best eaters for last, that way I rarely throw a rodent away.

All the above methods work but none are for the faint of heart. IMO, if'n ya can't kill the food, either buy it already dead or stop keeping animals that eat other animals. With few exceptions, feeding live is not safe. Exceptions being, the feeders don't have teeth (pinkies/fuzzies) and in rare cases the snake won't eat dead food. I have one of those, a female BRB that came to me as an adult, not only will she not eat dead, she will only eat mice. At least she doesn't seem to be picky about the color. I still stun them though,
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Thanks,

Dave "Rainbows-R-Us"


0.1 Wife (WC)
0.2 kids (CBB)
4.12 Brazilian Rainbow Boa
1.0 Hypomelanistic BRB
0.1 Het for Hypomelanistic BRB
0.1 BCI "Elvira" normal from 1989
1.0 BCI albino / het-anery
0.1 BCI Hypo / het-albino
0.1 BCI Anery / het-albino
0.1 BCI Hypo (possible super)
1.0 BCI albino het stripe
1.0 BCI salmon hypo
0.1 BCI ghost

lots.lots.lots feeder mice and rats

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