Today, we're going to be talking about a lot of the downsides with feeding your snakes live food so usually you have two options when
you're going to go and feed your snake.
Most snakes are going to be eating rodents whether it's mice or rats of all different sizes and you can get them available
frozen or live from different pet stores. So you might already know some snakes simply
just aren't going to take frozen and they only take live, many snakes can switch over
I've never had to deal with that so I can't really tell you anything too specific on how to switch them over to frozen,
but I am going to be giving you some reasons to encourage you to do
so if you are feeding live. This is also
just a way to, I guess give my opinions on the big argument on whether live mice and rats are actually bad for snakes or not.
The very first thing we can talk about are your
benefits as the keeper, the most simple one being that frozen, it's just a lot cheaper. You can get them in pretty large bulks
I buy them in a couple hundred at a time, and they are just cheaper by themselves,
I think I can get them for like,
75 cents to 2 dollars per mouse depending on the size. And in addition to that
you don't have to keep them alive since they're already frozen you just have to thaw them out and
feed them. So the next thing we're going to talk about is the actual impact on the mouse when you choose either live or
frozen food. So firstly; live, obviously the snake * the snake will bite the mouse, preferably on the head
but it might miss the head,
so maybe somewhere mid body or on the back, then it can wrap up and constrict that mouse and
basically what they do is each time the mouse exhales, the snake can wrap tighter,
which means that it cannot breathe, so it ends up becoming unconscious after basically being crushed and then being eaten.
So when a mouse is fed live it ends up dying from asphyxiation,
which is the same deal with frozen mice, however it's pretty different because the frozen mice aren't going to have to go through the actual,
like tightening and crushing of its body.
It's only simply going to be asphyxiated.
But this is usually called controlled atmosphere stunning, basically what happens is they're put into some sort of large container
where it's airtight and people can control the gases going in and out and the goal is to remove the oxygen and replace it with
some sort of gas that isn't going to keep you conscious, the most commonly used one is carbon dioxide.
Now this is a bit different from other chemicals, or other gases not chemicals because it is considered poisonous
but if you're using small amounts of
this gas at a time, the mice don't appear to have any physical pain brought to them. If you just immediately go
100% full on carbon dioxide this will be toxic, and they will feel pain,
but since people start just replacing the air slowly with the carbon dioxide,
they really won't notice and then they'll just end up passing out,
before they really feel much, even if they do feel some pain it's definitely not going to be compared to being fed live.
Now we're going to talk about the actual snakes themselves.
So a lot of people say "you can just feed your snakes live
because it's natural" but we've kind of talked about this before, just because something is natural, doesn't mean
it's the best for an animal. I guess a good way to kind of prove
this is the fact that snakes and pretty much any animal, is going to have a much longer lifespan in captivity
compared to in the wild 'cause you can really remove a ton of those dangers.
But the main danger comes when
your snake is going in for the strike and the kill of the mouse or rat, it grabs it and in that first few seconds
since it's going to take awhile for that animal to actually die when the snake is holding on, it has time to
eventually turn around and bite the snake that's biting it,
even if the snake did bite the mouse right on the face, the mouse still has claws and mouse claws are sharp
if you've ever felt them so they can easily scratch the snakes eyes, the scales,
and all this stuff can result in bleeding or injury
and it has in fact killed quite a few snakes in the past. People say like "Oh, I'll
just supervise the snake while it eats", but that's not going to be too useful if you're..
feeding it.., like it's really quick
it's all going to happen in just a couple seconds; the snake is going to bite, the mice is going to immediately
react in some kind, usually
they're just going to squirm around, but there is certainly that chance of the snake getting bit, or scratched or something like that.
So this is kind of the three main things that people talk about
your benefit as the person or the owner the mouse's benefit as it's dying *heh*
and then of course the actual safety of your pet snake. That's going to be more convenient to you 'cause
you can save money you don't have to feed the animals you can just keep them in the freezer until
you actually need them, you can stock up in bulk.
It's much better for the mouse because based on all the evidence so far,
it is way more humane for a mouse to die through a carbon dioxide gassing, where they basically don't feel anything at all,
compared to being grabbed, strangled, and suffocated by a massive snake, where it's completely helpless
and then of course the snake is going to be much safer when the food cannot fight back.
Hopefully this gave you some new insight on feeding live
versus frozen to your snakes, of course like I said,
some snakes are only going to take live, and it's not the end of the world if you can deal with it,
but I definitely wouldn't start feeding live, like I've seen some people say they goin' to get a snake and switch it to live..?
I definitely wouldn't do that
because it is quite difficult to move them back, but yeah
there's really no benefits in my opinion,
to feeding live. Let me know your thoughts and any other things that you've thought of during this video
in the comments, but that'll be it for this video. I'm Alex, and thanks for watching.
subtitles by Denali Draws on YouTube (Linked in description)