Reptile & Amphibian Forums

While sitting down for a rather long and tedius feeding session with my very stubborn female T.borneensis I stumbled upon a rather interesting teaseing method which MAY be applicible to all pitvipers.

While sitting in the dark with only a faint hint of light shineing in from the adjacent non ven room(it is near imposible to get her to eat with the light on) I proceeded to lower a rat pup into Mrs Borneensis's cage. After a few bumps on the nose and tail she was not showing interest so I dunked the rat into hot water and tried again. This time when I offered, the pup fell out of my hemos and onto the cage floor. I couldnt see so I lit my lighter for a better look (keep in mind that I have very long hemostats and was never near the buisness end). I was then promptly greeted with several strikes directly at the lighter!!! Noticeing her new found enthusiasm for strikeing I picked up the rat pup, lit the lighter outside of the cage and lowered the offering inbetween the glass cage wall and her. After one strike off to the right she latched on and went to town. Wah la!

Now I have noticed a tendancy for arboreal pitvipers to strike somtimes methodicly at a heat source and on several occasions have had my very large female T.purp go nuts at the heater while being transfered to a holding bin but never thought to exploit this until now. I have been useing hot water with my arboreal pitvipers for years but it would seem in this case anyway that the hotter the heat source he better. Since I cant feed her smoking hot rat pups out of the oven this seemed to be the second best choice:-D

Weather or not this will work for other sp of pitviper or anyone else's snake but mine I cannot say but given my sucsess it would seem to be worth a shot atleast.

Welp, there is my contribution. May this spur conversation that dose not inculde the word venomoid!!

All the best guys,
Jeremy

P.S I would love to hear others chime in and share thier feeding tricks. Not only for pitvipers but for all snakes, hot or not. Most can be used with many different genera so let us have em!!

Jeremy:

Nice trick! I love ideas that come out of the blue like that one. I don't anything out of the ordinary to get stubborn feeders to eat. I'll keep your "flame thrower" trick in mind if I keep PV's in the future. I do have a Puff adder that likes to drink from a small water bottle like you'd use for mice cages.

Thanks again for sharing the trick.

Best,
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Al

You can take the animal out of the jungle but you can never take the jungle out of the animal.

I will certainly keep that in mind, though I very rarely have problems with most pit vipers. I have found a few snakes (some ball pythons and our egyptian cobras) that seem much more willing to grab a mouse if it is as warm as I dare make it...