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[Lucille]

1) The first and most obvious problem with such a law would be enforcement. Like the laws purporting to prohibit certain kinds of sex, in order to enforce you have to generally go inside people's homes which requires a warrant and probable cause, and actually catch them in the act.
In this day and age of abuse and murder, I just do not see many judges signing warrants to send law enforcement officers into a citizen's home to catch them feeding live rodents to snakes. Most judges will not give a rats behind about such matters faced with all they have to do.

Even if you do happen to get an arrest, a conviction will cost tens of thousands of dollars for each conviction. A good attorney will impeach the officer's eyewitness testimony by showing that when a snake eats a dead rodents there is some rodent movement just because the snake moves the prey around while eating, and will demand that the officer prove that the prey was in fact live when eaten, and not just prove it, but prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. This is not so easy to do and if it cannot be done, there cannot be a convicition.

Most feedings take place fairly fast. If there is a live rat uneaten with a snake in an enclosure, it is not 'fed' according to the way the statute might be written because it is obviously not eaten. Once a snake strikes, it eats the prey up quickly, even with a warrant what are the chances that the officer will catch the live rat, in the jaws of the snake, and be able prove all of this beyond a reasonable doubt? It could be done but again, at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars of prosecutor, officer and expert time.

There are those that tape and publish their snakes eating live for entertainment. There are all kinds of proof problems involved: linking the publisher with the act is one. It would not necessarily be illegal to tape such a display, it would be illegal to feed and so the actual act of feeding ie putting the rodent in the enclosure would also have to be taped along with proof of identity of the person feeding, not the person publishing. I have seen a few of these distasteful types of displays but have not ever seen one that accurately shows the face of the feeder along with, in the same tape, the act of feeding to make the publication proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and then there would be problems authenticating such a record in order to have it admitted as evidence.


2) The next problem is that legislators considering such a law will focus on how rodents, etc. are killed prior to feeding. The commercial rodent houses have their mass production methods, but when the ordinary man on the street hears that private rodent breeders sometimes kill by slamming the rodent against a hard surface, he is naturally going to wonder whether such a law is in fact worthwhile.

3) Not only the commercial rodent houses but also the chicken/beef industry may pour a couple million in to see that such a proposed law quietly goes away unpassed. They all kill live and at least the commercial chicken/beef industry has come under fire and expensive litigation for their killing methods. They do not want any kind of focus on how animals are killed for commerce and I would think they would spend a lot to make such efforts go away. Not all the time, but many times, money wins.