Thread Rules
The Live Pile is a thread dedicated to the horror stories of feeding your reptiles live prey items. Most of these issues will specifically involve pet owners feeding their snakes live rodents and the damage inccured, but is certainly not limited to only snakes. This is not going to be an opinion column. Please only post an accurate description of what happened, pics if you have them and refrain from making comments on other's posts. If you are going to post someone else's experience, please make sure you have permission to use their pics and tell their story. Don't forget to cite who gave you the permission.
The Live Pile Introduction
I see many individuals here and across the net who feel that feeding live prey to their snakes is a safe and natural idea. While it's true that wild snakes eat live prey at times, it is a completely different ball game for captive animals. In the wild, a snake will often choose to chow down on prey that is already dead. In the rare instances that they hunt live prey, they have the upper hand. Snakes are generally ambush predators, and as such, the prey almost never see it coming. This of course is not always true. Many snakes in the wild still die or get permanently scarred from stubborn prey maulings. In captivity however, they prey sees the danger. Its survival instinct may take over and pose a very serious threat to your snake. This is especially true of rats and rabbits. These creatures are intelligent, strong and ornery. They don't like to die without a fight. This is assuming your snake even tries to fight. In many circumstances, a non-feeding reptile will get mauled by a live prey item. The prey item takes the snakes' lack of interest as an opportunity to start gnawing on it out of self defense. They have been known to strip snakes of their scales, bite out eyes, chew through the spine and much more. In the blink of an eye, a scared rat can easily kill or permanently damage your pet. Below is a story from one of our very own members. Please take a few minutes to read through her story, as it not only describes the wounds inflicted by live prey, but also the expensive vet bills and emotional stress of trying to rehab an animal that in no way had to go through this.
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Originally Posted by louise
Feeding live...to me, there is nothing worse to do to a snake. I got a rescue a little over a year ago. Her owner thought it was fine to throw live rats in with her. When I received her, she had 2 huge lumps on her head. They were rat bites that healed over and led to infection. I took her to the vet immediately. The lumps had to be removed as they were filled with infection. She had to have baytril shots for 2 weeks after the surgery and ointment put in the open wounds.
A few months later, the lumps returned, so back to the vet. The vet explained that snake infections are a hard mass instead of liquidly like ours. If all of the infection isn’t removed, it will come back. So she got to have operation number 2. Once home, she got shots of baytril for 2 weeks and ointment again. Sorry, no pictures of this surgery. I just prayed her pain was over after this surgery.
A few months later I found a new lump and one eye was all blue. The infection got behind her eye, so she was rushed to an all night vet. He had never worked on a snake before. He pierced the lump to relieve the pressure and drain some of the infection. The next day, I called her regular vet and set up another surgery. This time they put her under to perform the surgery. That was in december. They cut away all damaged tissue and scraped anything bad they could fine in her head. The anesthetic made her start spitting out blood when i got her home. She has been through so much because people refuse to believe how bad live feeding can be. If her pics don’t stop you from feeding live maybe a thousand dollar vet bill will. By the way, I named her 2nd Chance, Chance for short. She will never see another live prey item again and she will get her second chance. Here are some pictures of her last surgery and what the poor snake was spitting up afterwards. The top of her eye will never have scales again and one eye will always have a blue tint to it.
Please, don’t ever feed live. I have had many people tell me their snakes will only eat live… this is just not true. I have helped many people in threads and on yahoo to switch over. If you need help with it, I’d be happy to go step by step with you. I promise we can get it switched over. |
