Reptile & Amphibian Forums

has anyone sufferd a bad experience from feeding balls live food? please share your taughts on this for other ball owners. thanks in advance.

Many years ago I left a small rat in with one of my rainbow boas and it chewed it up pretty bad. Lucky it healed up. Very sad expereience to learn from. However I do still feed all live but am watching over them every 15 min. (never overnight unless it's a rat crawler or something of that nature.
Casey

About a month ago I was given a normal ball with complete setup. The lady's ex-husband bought it for their son during a weekend visit & sent it home with the kid, to mom's house. Mom was terrified of it and wouldn't let the boy handle it. The cage hadn't been cleaned in a year and it had been just about that long since its last meal.

The snake has a couple of scars from rat or mice bites. One's pretty nasty, but all have healed.

Not only can mice/rats gnaw on snakes while they're sleeping, if the snake doesn't get a good grip on the prey, leaving its head free, the mice/rat can, & usually will, bite the snake while being constricted.

Amazingly, this rescued ball didn't have any mites, diseases or health problems other than being a bit dehydrated. Screen top with incandescent bulb for heat and desert sand substrate. Its also just as docile as if its been handled everyday, all its life. Very few snake breeds would be so gentle after going a year without contact.

Hope this helps!
HH
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It is said that 1 out of every 4 people are mentally unbalanced. Think of your 3 closest friends, if they're normal, then it's you.

When I was younger (11 or 12), I put a small rat in with my female before I went to bed, figuring I'd wake up to see the rat gone, since it'd been a few weeks since she'd last eaten.

I woke up to the rat having eaten off most of her tail and several spots on her back right down to the spine. The petstore hadn't fed the rat or something, because it just chewed her to pieces. It was the worst thing I have ever woken up to, and I am still amazed that she survived the incident, since we couldn't afford to take her to the vet and pretty much just kept her warm and used Neosporin to prevent infection. She's scarred but it's not as bad as it could have been. I had nightmares for weeks after and have never felt so horribly guilty.

Needless to say I've been feeding prekilled/frozen rats ever since, and she doesn't seem to mind that her rats stay still!

~jenny
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1.1.1 normal ball pythons (Cindy, Darwin, and Periscope)
1.0 rex rat (Scurvy)
0.1 bunny (Spazz)
2.1 betta fishes (Vicious, Killer, and Butters)
2.2 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!