Thinking about feeding LIVE? Welcome to the Live Pile

[pathfinder36]

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.

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.

[Prince the King]

wow. i'm glad i read this warning at the right time. i only recently bought my red tail boa and it's safety and comfort is what i want to keep secure. many of the people around these areas have told me that it makes sense to feed it live food. but the reports would prove sensible that no rodent would die willingly. what exactly can be done instead of eating live prey. keep in mind i only bought my boa Prince about a week from today. i'm trying to seek as much information as i can gather. what other options are there.

[pathfinder36]

Click the link in my signature to find out all kinds of GREAT info on boas. Other then that, start a thread in the Boa forum. I'll give you my 2 cents on that thread as I'm sure a lot of others will too. =)

[wreckwriter]

This is a fantastic thread. Feeding live is totally stupid in 99.9% of cases but one of the most common mistakes people make. The snake that "won't eat anything but live" is a rare beast in my experience, usually the owner simply didn't do it right or didn't try hard enough.

[blkcrochunter]

Chance is a warrior, also no one should feed their monitors or tegus live either!

[wreckwriter]

Originally Posted by blkcrochunter

Chance is a warrior, also no one should feed their monitors or tegus live either!

Agreed.

[Prince the King]

thank you. i'll create a thread in the boa section to help me raise this fellah. at the moment though, i'm feeding it tiny baby mice. i don't believe there's any real threat at first is there.

[louise]

Originally Posted by Prince the King

thank you. i'll create a thread in the boa section to help me raise this fellah. at the moment though, i'm feeding it tiny baby mice. i don't believe there's any real threat at first is there.

yes there is always a threat. please feed it nothing llive. no reason not to give the snake frozen/thawed right away.

[psoulocybe]

Prince The King,

feeding live from the begining may encourage the boa to associating food with things that move... and inhibit it from eating non-moving prey. This could make switching it to Frozen/Thawed items harder in the future.

Baby mice (hoppers) do pose some danger to a small boa.... And it's so much easier to keep frozen mice or rat pups than to have to get live ones and keep them in good health.

[BWSmith]

This is a rehab I am working with right now. The infection is a direct result of stomatitis resulting from rat bites, and of course, the eaten tail. This is from AFTER surgery. I need to find the before shots. I am just the post-op caregiver. Swampy initiated the treatement and organized the rehab. This snake just took 2 small Frozen/Thawed rats for me last night. If this boa will eat f/t, any boa will.

This has to be one of the worst cases of neglect I have come across. This boa had stomatitis that went untreated by the previous owner and got so bad that its face was basically "peeled off" its skull. The infected tissue swelled up so far that it enveloped the teeth. And as usual with about any case of snake neglect, there is significant rodent damage from feeding live to a snake that evidently was unable to kill its prey. There is actually a couple inches of the tail completely gone. B W Smith