Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hello all,

I've been working on some ways to get my baby amazons up and started in the best way possible. First, my question: Would ingesting 1-2" of plain, sterilized, non-colored sewing thread pose any problems to young Corallus? I wouldn't think it would, seeing as how they often ingest great amounts of fur and feathers with no trouble at all.

My reason: I've taken to assist feeding those of my baby tree boas which have not yet taken a meal on their own. This simply consists of using a small rat or mouse tail, pushing it about 1/4 the way down the throat, and then replacing the snake in it's cage and allowing him to swallow the rest. I've yet to have on throw the tail back up; either they have enough time to realize after the initial thrashing that this is something edible, and so eat it, or it's just easier for it to go down then up. Either way , it's very easy and pretty much stress free except for the 30 seconds where I need to restrain the head. However, this obviously does not constitue a whole diet, plus it's not what I'd call "good training" for getting them to take whole mice on their own. Trying to assist feed even the smallest pinky mouse, however, is extremely difficult due to their small and fragile nature. So, my idea is to tie a tiny pink mouse to one end of a mouse tail, assist feed the other end of the tail as I normally would and hopefully allow the snake to swallow everything as one. Thus, getting it used to the idea of swallowing small rodents as food as well as keeping it on a healthy diet while it's not eating on it's own. The only concern I had was whether the string would pose any poblems to their digestive tracks. Please let me know your thoughts on this. Thanks,

-Christian-

I've seen amazons take down small pieces of Aspen without a prob. So a small thread should be fine.

Hey there,
I had a similar idea about this method.....I deal exclusively with Hognose, Easterns and Southerns. One of the goals of my animals, especially the southerns is to get them feeding on mice. Naturally they have great feeding responses to toads.....well I was thinking that if you used disolving stiches available through a Vet you could attach a F/t mouse or pink to a F/t toad, in turn getting the snake to eat both.. I don't know if it'd work but sounds good. The stitches would dissolve in the digestive tract of the animal or at least be passed during defication.
Paul Bollinger
Bayou.Surreal
504-415-2423

Chain feeding is what we call it and it's been around for years. A small piece of thread about 4" long is what we use but I really liked the idea of using disolving suture material. But when we've been forced to do this we've had no problems using sewing thread. If you think about it, the digestive tract of a snake is use to bone so a small piece of cotton fiber will be no problem.

The only problem might be if the string has anything added to it, if its treated with somting. But other then that it seems like a good idea, I used to take a clip and tie it to a string, clip the clip to the tail of a mouse and dangle it in front of my caimen, he grab it and it jerk the mouse free from the clip. Worked great with picky caimens.
Philip

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