Posted by:
jgragg
at Sat Apr 11 13:01:24 2009 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by jgragg ]
Re: not moving, yep, absolutely - particularly if the keeper chooses to go the "hard way" and fight the snake's nature.
If you just feed them live prey until they get pretty beefy (pencil-thick, almost foot long), I've found they're not as weirded-out by movement, especially at night.
For those hell-bent or forced by circumstance (e.g., the mcgregori example) on "the hard road" (tease-feeding), the best advice I can give is to set yourself up with something comfortable to sit on, and that gives you a place to set your elbows so you don't have to move your hands *at all* once you get the little bugger(s) to hang onto a piece of meat. The worst way to go is to crane yourself into an awkward position when offering the food, then be forced to hold that pose for an eternity while the snake decides whether to spit or swallow. This often happens if you've set the animal up in an elaborate cage on a taller shelf in the snake room (pers. exp.), and you fail to extract the animal from said cage for feeding. Go ahead and pull him out. Actually, this would be a form of conditioning (teaching) the animal: "when you come out you get fed" - not a bad thing.
I like a chair or stool (for me) and a little table (for the snake). Give the snake a perch - I find they spit less if they're hanging onto a perch (e.g., lip of a tall deli cup) with their tail and their head is dangling, than when they're just laying on the table.
I also like a dim light source behind the snake, so they're dimly lit but I'm sitting more in the dark.
A *very* gross generalization of my experience with ease of tease-feeding the principal arboreal genera would be:
Atheris - love them, most are easy, good place to learn tease-feeding would be chlorechis (the body-restraint trick mentioned earlier this thread works great with this genus, I find)
Bothriechis - OK, can be fairly easy, or a royal pain
Trimeresurus (broad sense) - very often, make me want to pull my hair out; some consistent exceptions (e.g., borneensis/puniceus complex)
Sorry Sanchez38, this may not be the best news. Go with the frogs!
Cheers,
Jimi
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RE: Pope's Viper Please help - jgragg, Sat Apr 11 13:01:24 2009
