I hope this can be useful to some folks out there. In 2003 and again in 2005 I was working with hatchling mandarins that refused to eat. I tried all the usual tricks, a December cooling and warm up, live, thawed, brained, exotic rodent pinkies, lizards, fish, everything. Nothing worked. In both cases I fell back on force feeding with mouse tails. In both cases I had to keep this up for a solid year. In both cases the break came in late summer. The year before last year the stubborn holdouts started feeding on live pinky mice. This year the only thing that worked were live dwarf hamster pinkies (dhp). Now I've gotten him to take live pink mice that were washed and scented with dhp odor.

I guess the lesson for me is patience pays off. It's a good thing for them they were pretty little devils or I might have given up.

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