Reptile & Amphibian Forums

this might sound like a dumb question but one of my cornsnakes has a wierd eating habit and i would like to know if anyone has info on this. i used to feed her f/t mice but now she will only eat live and when she started to eat live she would kill 2 or 3 mice before she would actually eat one. is this something that i should be concerned about or is this normal.

...how was she able to kill 2-3 before eating one?

If you put multiple live rodents in with her at the same time then it is a normal, and I assume self defense, behavior for the snake to kill more then one if not all of them before starting to eat. I have very often dealt with snakes that I had to feed live rodents to either as hatchlings or as newly wc specimens and most of my animals if you put more then one rodent in at the same time would do what you are describing. It also then becomes a trick sometimes to get them to eat any more then the last one they kill since the others are, by the time the snake gets back to them, dead carcasses.

If she is killing them and then ignoring them for awhile after which you give her more live ones then I would suggest only giving her one and waiting her out. If by the next day she still has not eaten it then I'd give her a fresh one but feed it to her in a much smaller container so she is in constant contact with it.

Either way I don't know of any real reason to offer her a second if she is not eating the first.

If I am completely misunderstanding what you meant then please let me know lol.

Sean.

hey thanks for the reply but maybe i was unclear, what i actually meant was that if i feed her on tuesday she may just kill the mouse and leave it alone and if i try to feed her on wednesday the same thing will happen but if i feed her on thursday she will finally eat

I have an adult corn that does this. Since he's eaten nothing but live all his life, we give him(assuming gender) 4 live mice every 2-3 weeks and he does the same thing. Kill all the mice, or just what he want to eat then goes back to eat all the ones he has killed. The ones that aren't eaten we take out and keep till next feeding time.

Now what's really weird was that our pet store ran out of mice so I gave him one of my hoppers I had (live) and he ate the thing live and backwards 0_o You could see the mouse trying to climb out. and he did this twice.

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1.0.0 Bearded Dragon (Rex- "normal" orange fire)
1.0.0 Bearded Dragon (Glutany- German Giant Mix)
0.1.0 Okeetee Corn (Okatee)
1.1.0 Spotted Python (Hotdog and Shoelace)

thanks for the reply