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buying frozen ones vs breeding my own

F

Fishy

New member
recently i got a corn snake and i had no idea that the frozen mice were so pricey! i could buy a live mouse for the price of 6 frozen ones. ive only got one snake.
so what im asking is if you were me and tight on money would you breed your own or continue buying the frozen ones? :) i thought it might be a neat experience breeding them also
 
For me it is worth it to buy them. I order them online and even with shipping it still comes out tons cheaper than buying them at the local pet store.
 
I have one snake. I buy live at my local pet shop on feeding day. I don't need to make a space in my freezer and I don't need to thaw mice. I DO have to kill a cute Stewart Little-looking little mouse a few times a month, but I don't have to take care of them and get to know them before that time.
 
For me it's a no brainer!!!! I WILL NOT FEED LIVE MICE as they can injure my snakes, and CAN NOT bring myself to watch them being killed as i'm a real animal lover and can't kill anything ( except locusts & crickets ). I buy a few weeks frozen at atime and thye don't take up hardly any room in the freezer!
 
it is weird that live is cheaper than frozen for you (locally anyway). usually it's the opposite. but if that's the case where you are and you don't want to buy bulk frozen mice, i think it would be a good idea to learn how to euthanize mice humanely. or sometimes you can find people in your area to split frozen orders with to decrease the cost.
 
You could probably get a couple of mice, literally one male and one female, and that would cover all your needs for rodents if you let them breed back to back.

IMO if frozen is so expensive, you could get away with breeding your own I think. It could easily be cheaper if you look around and find the cheapest bedding (doesn't matter if it's pine or not), good food for cheap (walmart carries good dog food for like 17 bucks for around that many pounds), and save random boxes to give to them to chew on. A 10 gallon tank should only cost you around 10-13 bucks and will do them well enough.
 
couldnt i just use shredded mail for bedding? i got tons of that.

but yeah 6 frozen babies is the price of one alive grown mouse here
6 frozen ones are 11.90 and the mouse is about 12 ? for a few dollars more i say its worth it. my snake eats the pinkie ones btw if i didnt mention. petsmart doesnt sell those live i would have to find some other petstore

thanks for all of your opinions theyre very helpful. :)
 
You can add shredded mail/paper, but it will get dirty, compressed from 6 inches thick to less than .5 inches thick, and soaked very quickly. You could mix half wood bedding half shredded paper and I'm sure that would do good.
 
oops i didnt see ur post. well ive got a trash bag FULL of it so it might be compressed like you said but still be enough. what do you think?
 
If you only have one snake I would go with F/T and I would try to find someplace online that you can order from. I know AmericanRodentSupply.com does great service. I feed a mixture of both since I have several different types of snakes that have several different feeding "wants" (like a corn snake that turns into a hateling if we offer it a rat instead of a mouse).
Petsmart is ok for F/T but they can get expensive quick. You figure 6 pinkies for 12$ (that is what mine here charges) yet when they get older you will have to buy bigger ones, for the same price and you get less in a box. Yet I just got in a shipment of 400 f/t mice ranging from pinkies to large adults, for a little over 100usd shipped.

Not to mention if you buy live and your snake ends up not wanting it, you would be stuck with a live mouse to take care of until your snake does want it. Which would end up adding additional costs as well.
 
uhm.. im a bit confused on the last part. do you mean if i tried to feed my snake a live mouse it wouldnt want it or.. ? idk thats what it sounded like to me
 
I dont jnow if i would want to give my snake dogfood is the bigger question :eek:.

I buy mice of the internet from the mouse factory. Work buddies and i get together and order around 1000 mice maybe twice a year? We get a discount because of the ordeder size and get a huge box of dryice to play with haha! Each mouse ends up costing pennies and it keeps me stocked year round!

Also :p. Anyone in the md area who wants to hop in on my orders let me know lol. I ned to make anither one here in a few months :p
 
We order online as well...mostly because I really couldn't face a colony of mice, having them as pets and using them for food. I'm not terribly squeamish, but if it's living in my house and I'm feeding it, it's a pet, not food. Ordering frozens online? Works much better for me...but if you're worried about expense, the shipping is rather pricey. But you only have to worry about it once in a while, and even with the shipping, it works out to about $.61/mouse (depending on where you order from, of course :) )

It may be worth investigating and drawing up a price chart for your different options. I know buying frozen from the pet store is definitely one of the pricier options.
 
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