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buying frozen ones vs breeding my own

Dorgrim said:
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
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I enjoy my dry ice more than I think the snakes enjoy their mice. We just got an order from Rodent Pro yesterday and today we have a few dry ice bombs. We even stuck dish soap and in bowl of water. The kids had a great time scooping up the bubbles and clapping their hands together so the "smoke" would come out.

It is a great way to have fun after a day of sorting mice.
 
I had a local pet shop that would sell me a pregnant female mouse. I'd raise the babies to the size I needed and give the female back to the pet shop along with a couple of Normal hatchlings. Was a great arrangement with only a handful of hatchlings around.
 
If it is only one I would buy live weekly... I have a bunch so I buy frozen. I did the breeding thing and it was more mess and smell to deal with and was not worth it.
 
i cant buy live weekly since my petstore doesnt sell the right kind of mice i need and i would have to go out of my way to find a petstore that sells the babies. my petstore is less then a mile away
 
dang fishy i wish i lived in texas. i breed and sell mice and rats and when i seen u say that a mouse is 5 dollars. dang. my mice sell for .75 cent each and if u buy 50 at one time i sell them for $30 for all. but if u are going to raise ur own mice u will only need one mouse. they will have babies every 21 days. and after another 21 days the first litter can be taken away and she will be giving birth again if not all ready. i take it you have a corn snake so if ur just going to feed them pinkies then u will need to kill them. best why is to use co2. let me know if u need any more info.
 
lunaticzx10r said:
dang fishy i wish i lived in texas. i breed and sell mice and rats and when i seen u say that a mouse is 5 dollars. dang. my mice sell for .75 cent each and if u buy 50 at one time i sell them for $30 for all. but if u are going to raise ur own mice u will only need one mouse. they will have babies every 21 days. and after another 21 days the first litter can be taken away and she will be giving birth again if not all ready. i take it you have a corn snake so if ur just going to feed them pinkies then u will need to kill them. best why is to use co2. let me know if u need any more info.
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If your going to breed them you will need two not one. A male and a female can produce a litter every 20ish days.
 
I've read that co2 is not a good method to kill pinkies at all. Newborns are capable of being sat on by their mother with limited oxygen, so it would take them a long time to die in a co2 chamber. In fact, the best way to kill PINKIES is to put them straight into the freezer imo. They are hairless so they can't keep in heat very well and die quickly.
 
yeah ur right i just put all my in a bag and push out as much air as i can and put them right into the dry ice freezer for a couple hours.
 
I actually considered buying frozen pinkies in bulk just because I have a huge deep freezer with very little in it as it is. I refuse to feed live ever because of the danger to my snake. Pinky is only about a month old, so I will be going on pinkies for quite a while.

A bag of 100 extra small pinkies = $35 at www.rodentpro.com
For each size increase, the bag goes up by $5 all the way up to $65 for hairless hoppers. The larger ones vary. But that seems to be cheaper than buying them individually in the store.
 
If the feeder is fed and watered, and you watch over the whole process, and you don't leave the feeder in longer than neccesary(10 minutes is what I was thinking)then the risk of feeding live is pretty close to the risk of feeding frozen. Just saying. Of course, do what ever you want!
 
pheonix said:
If the feeder is fed and watered, and you watch over the whole process, and you don't leave the feeder in longer than neccesary(10 minutes is what I was thinking)then the risk of feeding live is pretty close to the risk of feeding frozen. Just saying. Of course, do what ever you want!
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I beg to differ. A rodent can do plenty of damage to the snake within 10 minutes.
I would not feed live unless absolutely necessary.
I think Nanci mentioned in another post that it was shown that snakes fed live always (almost?) have parasites.
It's just not worth the risk.
 
nwheather said:
I beg to differ. A rodent can do plenty of damage to the snake within 10 minutes.
I would not feed live unless absolutely necessary.
I think Nanci mentioned in another post that it was shown that snakes fed live always (almost?) have parasites.
It's just not worth the risk.
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Yeah, I have a heard a lot more serious breeders and avid owners say this, but others say live. I think it's just a matter of opinion and choice. I love my baby too much to risk it. Though when I was growing up, my mom always fed our Arizona bulls live prey. They were caught in the wild though....so perhaps that is why she chose that route. At one point, we lived with a boyfriend of hers who had a wall of tanks with a variety of snakes and he bred live rats. The breeders were just as much like family while the offspring was purely food. Mom assures me that the rats were checked for parasites and disease before used to breed for the snakes...and each feeding was watched over carefully. So...to each their own.
 
I have never breed mice before, but i got hamster once and she was pregnant. It was a pain in the butt to make sure the other babies werent eating each other. They were messy and you still have to feed them, buy a cage provide them with some type of bedding....the costs for keeping two actively breeding mice is probably going to cost more in the long run than purchasing frozen thaw. Although i pick up my frozen thaws for about 1-1.50 a piece. Im on one pinky every 5 days for both my corns, but they are close to getting two a week.
 
Mice are ridiculously easy to keep and maintain and well, they breed like mice. They are also ridiculously odor free when kept properly so its a win win for me to raise my own mice. I'm able to feed my mice table scraps, chicken feed, and the like so my only real cost/investment was the housing, but I do love having fresh food that I can let grow to just the right size for my reptiles, arachnids, etc.
 
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These are pictures of my mice and how I do it. Believe it or not, this works to eliminate the odors to undetectable levels for more than a week, but I tend to change them more frequently.
 
The bedding I use is a mixture of equine pelletized bedding and newspaper shreds. I keep the paper as a lining in most of the cage and place the equine bedding on top of the paper. I then use shredded paper on top creating a sandwich of bedding which the mice use the top portions for their houses... so one must put enough extra in to supply them with this as well. The end result is I have no odor... absolutely none that I can detect for weeks with a simple change of some of the paper on top done weekly and a complete change done every few weeks.
 
in here I buy pinkies like 0.80€ . not sure about the price for adult mouse.
anyway, in my opinion, I think its better to feed it with death mice.
I read somewhere that sometimes (not with all, but with some) the snakes start on getting some 'fear' and that means more sly and less confidence on you. you are giving it "dead" food and then live food... kind of confuse to it, I guess... And I heard about the parasites too.

So... If dead ones its ok, why risk it? ^^
 
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