Jello for snakes??? with appologies to Bill Cosby

[sschind]

I have a pretty disgusting idea for feeding garters but I am wondering if it might work. Let say you took a bunch of healthy food (mice, nightcrawlers, trout etc.) and threw it all in a blender and simply ground it up into a big slurry. Then you took some of the unflavored gelatin and mixed it in and let the mixture gel on a thin cookie sheet and cut the resulting Jello into strips and fed it to the snakes. Would the gelatin be bad for the snakes.

I doubt if I would ever go through the process because I don't think you could freeze the Jello, and I don't think it would keep that well in the fridge but it is something I have thought about in the past, mainly as another reason to break out the blender, or should I say The Bass-O-Matic.

OK, I just found Allan's page and read his recipe for Garter snake Jello. Has anyone else tried it.

[Stefan-A]

I can't think of anything apart from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

No, I wouldnt try it. I would try sausages, though.

[zooplan]

I´ve tried something similar:
Fischpüreeplatten eine Futtervariante für Thamnophen
I think google will give you a raw translation?

[drache]

okay
I read that and it reminded me of the ground beef thread
It's basically ground fish with supplements
there's no gelatin involved
however the only thing I can see as being wrong with gelatin is that it's a processed substance and I don't know what goes into the processing of it

[zooplan]

yes,
but when you freeze the grounded fish it stick together and become a homogenous bulk.

[stonyloam]

Gelatin is nothing but protein, so I can’t see how it would do any harm. It is made by boiling bones and extracting the proteins. If you have ever made chicken soup (by boiling a whole chicken, bones and all) and put it in the frig, the fat comes to the top and solidifies, but underneath the soup also solidifies. That is a kind of gelatin. It should freeze just fine. Just my opinion.

[salzar]

its calles repeto consomae the IRON CHEF made it once on the food network, they eat any thing in japan. heeeeee heee haaaa no not really!!! just funnun
bye
michelle

[sschind]

I can't think of anything apart from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

No, I wouldnt try it. I would try sausages, though.

were you serious about the C-J disease. If so, how would grinding up a bunch of stuff that you would normally feed whole cause any more of a problem? If you were joking then I'm sorry I missed it. I know the mad cow thing was brought up in the ground beef thread which, yes Drache, did prompt this thread The problem with ground beef (aside from the poor nutritional value if you are talking about simple hamburger) is that there is not much structure to hold the food together. It seems it might be difficult for a snake to get a grip on it and swallow it if you know what I mean. The gelatin would serve to hold it together. The sausages are pretty much the same concept except the agent that hold the goop together is different.

I tried the free translation of your page zooplan but it did not work too well (I got the gist of it though) Like I said, I don't know if I would try it but if I get a lot of snakes that won't switch to mice then it might be an option. It might be kind of fun.

[Stefan-A]

were you serious about the C-J disease.

I wouldn't consider it a serious threat, but there was a big health scare waaay back.

[drache]

wouldn't any kind of animal protein one grinds up sort of form its own gelatin
isn't that what aspic is?
so unless one added a lot of water, one could just somehow shape it I suppose
still, I can't see any of my snakes eat much of anything that doesn't hold together
how would one make the sausages?
with small rodent bladders and intestines?
fish guts?
seems tedious