Getting off Pinks

[stevenrudge]

Hurray!its just taken me six months,Yeah SIX MONTHS,to get some Black Eastern Garters off a pure pinky diet,back onto a balanced fish based diet.
l honestly thought l was going to fail,
When l bought them just as l was leaving the seller informed me that he had (transfured) them over to a pinky diet,had l known this before l would not have bought them.
Back at base l put normal food in--nothing touched
Put pinkies in ate the lot
Tried pinkies with fish,only ate the pinks
l kept trying the pinky fish combo--would only eat the pinks
Back in March l thought sod-it they can go hungry
l've left them alone with no food for about four weeks feeding the rest of my garters in the same rack around them as normal
Put in fish only today and bingo they ate all the fish
sorted

[Invisible Snake]

Congratulations. I mostly feed my garters pinkies and live guppies. Hey may I ask why you wanted to get them off pinkies?

[katach]

Some keepers prefer to feed what they would normally eat in the wild. Pinkies are not a normal food for them. Pinkies are still very balanced in nutrition, but as long as you understand the varied diet of what they would eat in the wild they still get the nutrition they need. Hope that helps.

[BUSHSNAKE]

a true varied diet would include rodents, thamnophis are very oportunistic...if they are available in their habitat then they are eating them...what really confuses me is when i find Thamnophis in sand prairies,must be taking down rodents and possibly even lizards

[chris-uk]

Good work. I may be looking at a similar process, the radix I got from John seems to prefer pinkies and refuses fish (so far).

Right now I'd rather she was eating anything as she's needs the nutrition to help her skin heal, so I won't try hard to gets her to take fish until I'm happy that she's healed. I was saying to the wife today after Adora took pinkies without hesitation, but refused the salmon, that I don't know how I'd scent salmon to smell of pinky. Maybe I'll try the starve strategy in a couple of months. Things is I know John fed his snakes on fish with just the odd pinky, so I'm surprised she's refusing the fish.

It's good to know that you can get them back onto a mixed diet after they've been on a solid pinky diet.

[katach]

We mix it up here too. Worms, fish, slugs, and pinkies.

[BUSHSNAKE]

im interested in breeding an amphibian to offer as food such as axolotles or reed frogs...any thoughts out there on that?

[d_virginiana]

Wow, it's usually the other way around; trying to get garters who are used to fish and worms to eat pinkies. We mix the food items up too, but the pinkies were definitely the hardest to get them to eat for us, especially with my older one.

im interested in breeding an amphibian to offer as food such as axolotles or reed frogs...any thoughts out there on that?

I'd just say to make sure you're breeding an amphibian that your snakes could encounter in the wild (like Chantel's). My garter regurgitated food (the only time in his life) when I gave him a pinky that I had previously offered my pacman frog. I think even non-poisonous amphibians can be toxic to snakes that aren't designed to eat them just because a lot of them produce some sort of low-grade toxin in their skin.

[ConcinusMan]

im interested in breeding an amphibian to offer as food such as axolotles or reed frogs...any thoughts out there on that?

Yeah, I was just thinking about that. I collected eggs and now have a ton of squirming, thriving little chorus frog tadpoles which have grown tremendously since hatching and need nothing more than an occasional water change and a little flake fish food. Man, these tadpoles would be perfect baby garter food. In just a few months, I'll have little froglets. But alas, now that I have the tadpoles, I have no baby garters.

When I kept adult chorus frogs, they did breed but only produced perhaps 30 eggs, and the frogs are high maintenance. Wouldn't be cost effective or practical, but collecting the wild eggs and raising them, is. Good timing too. Tadpoles are full size about the time that baby garters are available for sale. (April, May)

If only there was a way to ship them alive as baby garter food. There are thousands of them in standing water outside my door, plus the ones I'm raising. I would imagine that the ones I hatched out indoors are free of parasites.

Personally, I wouldn't fuss if I had a garter that ate only pinks. That's fine really, but getting them on fish too, at least gives you other options.

[stevenrudge]

ok feeding pinks or rodents in a mixed varied diet is not a problem,the problem is what it leads to if the diet is based or a pure rodent diet,there is a tendency at lest in England within the pet trade to sell garters on a mouse based diet, while l admit that a small garter looks to be doing fine on a pinky diet it naturally lead to a exclusive mouse diet for the rest of its life,and that has to be wrong for many resigns to big to go into on this thred but the short version is-garters are designed to eat soft bodied animals,a mouse is not a soft bodied animal.Garters have a high metabolic rates-they digest there soft bodied food very quickly.A mouse diet takes longer to digest so your messing with the snakes natural metabolic and digestive rates.its mush easier just to defrost and feed a mouse than use fish so hobbiest are inclined to stick with the mice so this leads to the garters not having any variation in their diets.plus in Europe there is anecdotal evidence that a mouse diet shortens the life span of garter snakes, So for us as hobbiest wanting to take the best possible care of are pets why would we want to take the risks with are pets food just because its easier for us to feed mice?