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Live or F/T?

While I fully agree that f/t is safer, there seems to be a religious like belief that live should never be used.
No one kills their prey for them in the wild. Occasionally they may scavenge something that is already dead, but that's the exception rather than the rule.

Injuries are very unlikely if the keeper pays attention and removes prey that the snake is not interested in eating, and injuries from rodents are far far far more likely from rats than they are from mice.

Is there a risk? Sure, but there is also a benefit. A snake gets more exercise and more muscle tone when it has to hunt down and constrict its prey.

I still highly recommend f/t both for economic reasons and for safety, but I think sometimes the risk is overstated, and I think the benefit may outweigh the risk for breeding females.
 
Even if the snake *is* interested in the prey item it can still harm the corn. And this isn't the wild, if we wanted our snakes to live that way we wouldn't even own them.
So as long as the snake will willingly accept F/T, it should be our duty as responsible pet owners to limit exposure to any dangerous elements.

Why needlessly put your pet in harms way?
 
Corny Noob said:
Even if the snake *is* interested in the prey item it can still harm the corn.
Click to expand...

True - I just think it is extremely rare. I've fed plenty of live mice and only had one occurrence of a bite, and that wasn't a standard lab mouse - they were out of standard lab mice. It was some tanish brownish variety with ruby eyes and a different body shape that bounced around like mad despite being larger than a hopper. I refuse that variety of mouse now. While that mouse did bite the snake, the snake killed the mouse quickly and healed just fine. Mating bites can be more severe and draw more blood. In fact this year I had to rescue a female from a male who had a significant clamp on her head, and the wound took much longer to heal.

Rat attacks on snakes are far far far more common than mice, and I suspect the horrors of what has happened to ball pythons when on their not uncommon feeding strikes with clueless owners has biased and tainted the view on live feeders.
 
FunkyRes said:
Is there a risk? Sure, but there is also a benefit. A snake gets more exercise and more muscle tone when it has to hunt down and constrict its prey.
Click to expand...

Feeding from tongs and allowing the snake to 'hunt' by moving the mouse away as the snake follows it, will give pretty much the same amount of exercise as if a live mouse was fed. Most of the energy is expended in the constriction, and both of my snakes will strike and constrict.

Coupled with gentle handling a couple of times a week, I think my snakes have excellent muscle tone, and I've never fed live.

I personally don't see the point if the snake is willing to accept F/T.
 
Snake Dave said:
I think my snakes have excellent muscle tone, and I've never fed live.
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I agree, Amel Boy is a rock! Plus, it's kind of fun to tease him. Pay back for all the times he's pooped on me.

I don't have any live fed snakes to compare him too. I've heard live fed have better tone, but it's not like f/t fed have *no* tone. Amel Boy really is a frigging rock, even compared to all the other f/t snakes I know. I have no idea why.
 
FunkyRes said:
While I fully agree that f/t is safer, there seems to be a religious like belief that live should never be used.
No one kills their prey for them in the wild. Occasionally they may scavenge something that is already dead, but that's the exception rather than the rule.

Injuries are very unlikely if the keeper pays attention and removes prey that the snake is not interested in eating, and injuries from rodents are far far far more likely from rats than they are from mice.

Is there a risk? Sure, but there is also a benefit. A snake gets more exercise and more muscle tone when it has to hunt down and constrict its prey.

I still highly recommend f/t both for economic reasons and for safety, but I think sometimes the risk is overstated, and I think the benefit may outweigh the risk for breeding females.
Click to expand...
Here is where your thinking is thawed. Snakes do not have prey killed for them....true. HOWEVER..and this a big one...they are not fed weekly in a small box where they haven't hunted the prey and found the best position in which to strike. They are often hungry, but not VERY hungry. I personally know of one gentleman who believes that God made them to eat live and now he has a snake without an eye. I was going to take a snake for a rescue but it was killed by the prey it was supposed to eat before I got it. Why would anyone take even a small risk for nothing? I value my snakes too much to do that, aside from the monetary value of some of them. Please explain how much "hunting down" your snake does in a 12 X 14 box or tank..or even a 36 X 14 tank? Not much. As far as constriction. Mine all constrict...just like it's alive. So they get plenty of "exercise"..such as it is...as yours does, without the risk. If my females need more exercise, I take them out and let them crawl around. They get far more toning exercise from that then they do from watching a mouse move around and then maybe crawling 6" to get it. I fed one female a live mouse after she laid eggs to try to get her to eat. Probably would have eaten the f/t the next day if I had just been patient, but I was paranoid that she had lost too much weight. She sat in her hide and watched the mouse....then she waited until the little bugger stuck it's nose into the hide one too many times and nailed it. She didn't move an inch to get it. LOTS of exercise there! I'm sure she was exhausted! I can get mine to chase a frozen/thawed mouse on tongs if I really want to amuse myself. I fed my large amel on the floor one day because I had snakes in all the other boxes. He chased me all over the room to get the rat. He got plenty of exercise that evening going after a dangling f/t rat and me! Your theory doesn't add up.
 
Here is where your thinking is thawed. Snakes do not have prey killed for them....true. HOWEVER..and this a big one...they are not fed weekly in a small box where they haven't hunted the prey and found the best position in which to strike.

True - which is why you pay attention and remove the mouse if the snake isn't interested in feeding.

It's fine to disagree with me, maybe if you only have a few snakes you really can give them enough exercise to compensate for lack of hunt/constriction.

I only recently started feeding live to my females, and I'll state it again - only to females that I plan to breed, only every other feeding, and only to females that I can not entice to constrict by jiggling the rodent. That's in my first post in this thread (I think my first post).

Joe Hiduke informed us that the huge corn snake colony he managed was switched to a diet of more live prey than thawed frozen, and his perception is that it's a contributing factor in the frequency of dystocia decreasing noticeably - Kathy and Bill Love, "Corn Snakes The Comprehensive Owner's Guide", pg 138.

If your corn snake is just a pet, never offering live if it takes f/t is the right thing to do. If you have many snakes and you breed, the benefits of constriction for females that can not be enticed to constrict f/t prey in my opinion outweighs the risk of live, which is extremely small when the feeding is properly monitored and mice are used instead of rats.

My live only feeders are definitely much stronger than my f/t feeders, and wild snakes I come across are definitely much stronger than my live feeders. When we ask a snake to lay eggs for us, physical condition of the snake is very important. That's why I have my opinion, which just that - an opinion.
 
I converted my old corn over to live.I did'nt like when I would un-thaw a mouse and then him not eat it.With live,if he does'nt take it,you can just pop it in a small tank for a week,then offer it again,,no waste.
I sold that corn a while ago,,but now have a new corn and a bull snake.
The bull had her first live meal Fri...She is a MEAN killer :eek:,the corn is young and on F/T..
I think feeding live or F/T is up to the keeper,no big deal,,just know that if you choose live you HAVE to watch the kill,,just in case your snake strikes a bit off the mark...
 
I used to feed live but recently after my snake laid her eggs I started feeding frozen because she was so hungry she didn't care if she got hurt and that worried me so I find it is much safer for the snake to feed it frozen rather then live. I can only buy live mice here and I can't store mice in my freezer so I put them in the freezer for about 10-30 minutes then feed them to my snakes. It makes me feel much better knowing I don't have to worry about them getting bit.
 
JanuaryLove said:
what are your inputs and why?
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Pictures are worth a 1000 words.
But this is a rescued animal that was fed live animals. From what I was told these wounds are 5 years old. This snake was gnawed on by its food.
This is from an adult corn snake.

DSC00117.jpg


DSC00104.jpg
 
Question to the live feeders-
Many of you state that you watch the kill and are ready if it goes a bit wrong.
So tell me this. You drop in a live mouse, your snake strikes but doesn't get it square on the head. It gets the shoulder or side and wraps around to constrict. The mouse knows it's about to die and turns and bites at your snakes head....How quick are you to stop this happening, and more to the point HOW, do you remedy this. After all there is a life and death struggle going on in your viv.....I would be interested to know how you do this.....Just saying you watch and are ready isn't good enough for me...I want facts.....
 
That's never been an issue. Occasionally a snake gets a bad grip (grabs the leg or whatever) but they always manage to coil nicely. In fact - I've witness a king coil a mouse without even biting it - because he had another mouse coiled that he was biting. I've also seen them coil a mouse, let go and move it down the coils while they coil another.

A very good friend of mine died because he nicked himself while shaving, it got infected and the infection spread to his brain very quickly. While I personally rarely shave, the fact that there are documented cases of shaving resulting in death, including a friend of mine, doesn't mean a father shouldn't teach his son how to shave.

Snakes are very good at what they do, even a snake raised on f/t figures it out very quickly and are very adept at it. Accidents are the exception, not the rule. Gnawed snakes like the one shown in the photo from the rescue are the result of leaving prey in with a snake that is not interested in feeding. That's easy to avoid - if a snake is going to eat, it pursues the prey very quickly. If it doesn't, remove the prey.
 
not exactly the answer I was seeking is it......Very rarely etc.etc. Isn't an answer to my question is it......I want to know the procedure for the time it goes wrong...After all, live feeders have stated they are ready. So what is the procedure for when it goes wrong. No matter how remote the scenario , what do you do?
 
Same thing I did when one of my kings clamped down hard on the head of the other during breeding.
Interfere and remedy the situation.

Unless the snake doesn't have room to maneuver around, it will quickly correct a bad constrict. They are constrictors, it's what they do.
 
FunkyRes said:
Same thing I did when one of my kings clamped down hard on the head of the other during breeding.
Interfere and remedy the situation.

Unless the snake doesn't have room to maneuver around, it will quickly correct a bad constrict. They are constrictors, it's what they do.
Click to expand...
Perhaps I'm not making myself or my question clear to the live feeders.....Interfere and remedy isn't a proper answer..... Like I said 'the mouse turns to bite your snakes head' exactly how do you stop the bite from occurring. I'm interested to know how you are faster than a split second.
 
You can't stop it from it occurring. Such an action from the mouse will result in tighter constriction from the snake until the mouse loses consciousness. I've kept snakes for years, and for years, I used nothing but live. Now I do use primarily f/t but the primary reason is economics, f/t are cheaper. Why was it never a problem for me? Because snakes that are hungry are very good at killing their prey, thousands of years of natural selection has resulted in an excellent rodent killer.

The problems that happen are almost exclusively the result of a snake that is not hungry. Remove the mouse and wait a week, and see if it is hungry then.

After switching to f/t exclusively for anything that takes f/t - I switched back to partial live for breeding females that take them. I bet most of the people in this thread, if not all of them, who so religiously argue against live feeders have not used live food to any extent and to be blundt, don't really know what they are talking about.

Show me a chewed up snake and I'll show you a snake that wasn't hungry and left unattended with its prey.
 
I also bet that a lot of very experienced "big name" herpers make use of live who just don't speak up about it because they've rather not be told that they are bad people for doing so.
 
I'm an old hand at snakes.....I also fed live for years...I also had a snake not strike square on to a mouse, and the mouse tried to reach around to bite the snake. Lucky for the snake the mouse could not quite reach and the snake killed it.....A friend of mine wasn't so lucky (or his snake wasn't) the same thing happened to his snake but the mouse made contact and bit through the base of his snakes head and killed it. It bit right into it's brain.....I don't mention this much as it upset me no end, and I realised how luck I had been. That was nearly 30yrs ago when F/T were not as available in the UK. I started to prekill or at least stun my mice rats and rabbits after that.......
Back to my original question, how will you stop that from happening, I know you have a procedure as you have already mentioned the king snakes....So elaborate and educate me..... I'm not here to put you on the spot, I am genuinely interested. After all I don't believe everyone knows everything about snakes not even Kathy Love, Roy Munson none of them, they might know a lot more than me and most of the members here but I think we can all learn something new every day and I like to discuss any new ideas.... Check the threads and you will find I'm the one who stuck up for eggs as food, cohab gravid females, and snakes in bags.......I'm not saying any of them were right but I am willing to listen to there logic. So now a difinitive answer from you or anyone who feeds live....How do you stop the bite in time to stop it hurting the snake.....
 
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