feeding live pinkys??

[Edcase]

I never went to the zoo and saw them throw a live zebra in with the lions!

lol that would be amusin to see...the zoo keeper just throwing a zebra over the fence, not the actual eating.

I agree that it is the "circle of life" but with a CHOICE of dead and alive i would have to go with dead. I was a bit disgusted when my bro found a mouse and fed it to his trantula . Id seen the crickets etc get eaten by it but i guess i feel differenty bout bugs lol.

[CrazyHedgehog]

I think the reason is that in the wild, a mouse gets a fair chance at escaping.. in a tank there is not much space to run and hide,
but soap boxes aside then...
If the mouse is cornered, there is a chance it may fight back and bite your snake, you are more likely to lose the snake from infection as the bite may be too small to see at first until badly infected...

[Lee]

I think the reason is that in the wild, a mouse gets a fair chance at escaping.. in a tank there is not much space to run and hide,
but soap boxes aside then...
If the mouse is cornered, there is a chance it may fight back and bite your snake, you are more likely to lose the snake from infection as the bite may be too small to see at first until badly infected...

So lets say in the wild (just random numbers) a snake comes across 100 mice in its life that it attempts to catch and eat. It captures and eats 20 mice in its life. The other 80 escape. So instead of feeding it the 20 mice it would normally catch alive, we just throw out live prey all together. We take away its instincts to hunt and instead throw in a dead meal every now and then. ;*( I don't like this idea of yours.

[CrazyHedgehog]

Hey I didn't say I had all the answers, just a few reasons...
in the wild, a garter snake might bite and would always musk...I don't want my pets to do that all the time either!!
a lot of garters get eaten by birds in the wild, are you saying we should then feed a few of our garters to the birds in the garden, thus completing the circle?

[adamanteus]

This seems like an appropriate moment to point out that in the UK (and elsewhere?), the use of live rodents for feeding to snakes (and other animals) is illegal. The law sees it as being unnecessarily cruel. Who are we to argue?

As for taking away their instinct to hunt....that brings me back to the point I made about throwing live zebras to the lions in the zoo. Or letting your pet dog join the local pack and kill some of your neighbours.

It seems to me that if your snake will willingly accept dead animals, the use of live food is blood-thirsty and ghoulish, and simply done for sport.

[Elliot]

Keeping a snake in a cage isn't the circle of life. It's keeping an animal confined, out of it's natural habitat. And why would it need hunting instincts to find food in a small clear box? It's really hard to justify the use of live animals for food, especially if it eats dead animals.

[Serpentine99]

I highly doubt this is going to end in a straight forward answer that everyone's going to agree on.

We sure have alot of these debates don't we?

[ssssnakeluvr]

and thats a good thing...if everyone on this planet thought the same way and liked the same things, I'd be catching the next shuttle to another planet!!

[Serpentine99]

I think it's funny how quickly these debates start and how heated they become in such a short time.

It's also interesting to hear other peoples views and opinions that you may not have thought of yet.

[Elliot]

I hope it doesn't get to ugly, but live feeding may be one of the more "passionate" debates in snake keeping.