Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I've noticed that quite a few of you are commenting on the price of live rats over frozen. What kind of prises are you looking at ? In the UK a petstore rat will set you back £7 ($13). Where as the price of frozen is really cheap, ratpups (which I'm feeding to my snake at the moment) are about £0.43 ($0.80) even jumbo rats are only £1.50 ($3.20).

Also when people on the forum have snakes that will not eat the advice given is to try mice to get them to eat, here the advice is to use a Gerbil/Jird which is a natural food source for them in the wild. As the advice on this forum comes from people who look after there snakes on a day to day basis what's your opinion ?

Couldn't resist, my snake just shed and has a new shiny set of scales ( still cannot get her to smile for the camera though ).

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0.1 Royal python
0.2 Dogs
2.0 guineapigs
1.1 kids
0.1 wife

Frozen tends to be alot cheaper because you can order in bulk and get a price break, where as with live its really not realistic to get 3 months worth of rats at a time...

As far as getting your guy to eat, the paper bag trick always works well for me. All you do is put a live rat pinky in a paperlunch bag with your snake (never do this with a live mouse or rat that has its eyes open, teeth or any means of hurting your snakes), and put that in the enclosure incase it gets out. Leave it over night and a majority of the time it will have eatten.

Works for me, hopefully for you too..

good luck.
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- Mike Fourquet

CLOACA HERPS

Depending on where you are in the country, you can't buy gerbils anywhere. I live on the west coast and I've never seen a gerbil in person, ever. However, most snakes in this area have already been eating mice, so scenting with a mouse works because they're captive bred and are accustomed to that scent, not gerbil-scent.

I wish we got the frozen rodents that much cheaper around here! For me, a medium frozen rat is 3.99 and a large is 4.99 - cheaper than the live ones, but still adds up pretty quick. I like frozen because I don't have to feed it and give it water if my snake decides she doesn't want it after all.

~jenny
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1.1 normal ball pythons (Cindy and Darwin)
1.0 rex rat (Scurvy)
0.1 bunny (Spazz)
2.1 betta fishes (Vicious, Killer, and Butters)
3.1 great danes (Shasta, Odysseus, Merlot, and Watson)
1.0 fat fuzzy mutt (Smokey)
1.1 cats (Thidwick and Turtle)
2.0 horses (Buddy and Sam)
1.0 goat (Billy Jack)
2.25 chickens (Jacques the rooster and his harem)

but what I really want is more ball pythons!