Constricting prey = best work out for your captive snake??

[Stock350]

Now, it goes Pinkies, fuzzies, fluffies, hoppers, adult, right?

You feed live?

 

[Plissken]

I believe fuzzies and fluffies are the same thing. Over here at least, we go straight from fuzzies to hoppers.

 

[Fenderplayer108]

Now, it goes Pinkies, fuzzies, fluffies, hoppers, adult, right?

You feed live?

I do NOT feed live. Its pinks, peach fuzzies, fuzzies, hopper, weanlings, large adults, XL adults, weaned rats, small rats.

 

[Cycal]

Perhaps corns are just becoming domesticated and losing some of their original natural instincts/motivation? :shrugs:

Poodles dont pack up together to take down a sack of Purinia, and wolves wont sit in your lap during late night reruns of M.A.S.H.

 

[RedRaydin]

My Perspective on this..

Personal experience. My snake was a wus, and dumb when I got it. Tried the swallowing thing head first or butt feeding, whatever it wanted each time it fed. Well as I increased sizes from pinks to fuzzies, almost now to hoppers, it realizes, hey this mouse isn't going to go down without a fight. So what do I do? I wiggle the mouse with tongs in front of the snakes hide, lure the snake out, hold it up with the tongs and the snake jumps at it wraps mid air and pulls it down quickly as I release the tongs. Nothing works better than wiggling mouse legs and tail right above the snake. If that won't get it to constrict nothing will. It works every time, I kid you not even the fuzzies get 2 good wraps around em. Just my two cents. Tong feeding (if using live) works great.

 

[tom e]

Perhaps corns are just becoming domesticated and losing some of their original natural instincts/motivation? :shrugs:

Poodles dont pack up together to take down a sack of Purinia, and wolves wont sit in your lap during late night reruns of M.A.S.H.

Or perhaps they sometimes just aren't fooled by our wiggling dead mice and know constricting won't be necesary.
My snake knows how to kill.. (I fed him live once before you all trained me right.. :grin01: )
This might not be the right place for it, but I would question (*GULP* :flames: HERE IT COMES) whether snakes really have the type of brain function that can be domesticated (as opposed to conditioned to accept handling)... of course we would have to agree to define our terms so as not to argue semantics.

But the question is still important, I think. For instance what if, in the distant future, corns were endagered and we were called upon to replenish wild stock? Would our "normals" be up to the challenge?

BTW- I can't imagine toy poodle chasing down their game either, though I could easily see them packing up with other dogs to survive if they had to. And even producing stock (with other dogs) to create a very successful feral dog.. in other words, I don't think the example fits because it's not about their instinct that necesarily limits their survivability, but rather their physical form. I would see that as a very good example of why, say a blizzard corn might have a hard time growing up in the wild without getting eaten by a predator..

 

[Skazzle]

To the best of my knowledge, instincts are more genetics than anything. Learned responses don't affect the next generation unless they are taught. They will have similar tendencies, such as a parent not liking to constrict dead prey could have babies that had the same tendencies, but I don't think that overall snakes will lose their ability to do so. Unless of course it was over an extremely long period of time and the genes changed. If you took a neonate and separated it from rest of them at birth and put it in the wild, I think it would still be a 'wild' snake and be quite capable of surviving and constricting. But the others who have been eating dead prey could react differently just because they are not forced to constrict their prey.

Please correct me if there are any mistakes, this is just coming my own knowledge, none of it was taken from any sources.

 

[larryg]

With my Miami Corn babies, less than 1 out of 5 will accept pinkies when offered. Almost all will accept lizards. About 1 out of 10 will not accept lizards but will accept pinkies. Another 1 out of 10 or so accept pinkies and lizards. In the wild, first meals of lizards might be more likely than encountering pinky mice running around. Breeders do favor those specimens that easily feed on pinky mice, whether that is really the norm for all wild Corns or not. Perhaps it could be a problem if the Corns no longer recognized lizards as prey but only accepted pinkies, due to selective breeding, like the 1 out of 10 or so I mentioned. My lines are not far from wild caught (no more than a few generations.) With selectively bred lines over decades, that percentage might be higher, and they might not recognize prey items that wild caught or closer-to-wild-caught specimens would.

Albinos of any species generally do not survive well, as a group (why they are so few in number, unless bred in captivity.)