Over the course of your snakes life you will be responsible for its health and well being. A large part of both of those is ensuring that it is being properly fed. The first thing to realize is that all snakes are carnivores. Let me say that again, snakes are carnivores. All of them. Emphasis added because invariably someone will come along and ask “What kind of vegetables is it safe to feed my snake?” And the answer is none. If you’re considering feeding your snake vegetables, fruit, grain, dairy or anything else of that nature don’t. You could very well kill it.
The question becomes what kind of meat does a snake eat. That depends mostly on the snake. Some eat mammals, some eat other snakes, some worms, some birds, some fish, some eggs, some… you get the idea. Regardless of what they all eat their prey whole because their teeth are curved back and don’t allow for chewing. That means you can’t drop a slab of steak in with them and expect them to eat it. Snakes need the fur and bones and internal organs of the animals they eat in order to meet their nutritional needs. Pure speculation but I suspect it is a result of the fact that they don’t eat vegetables.
In this article we will explore several areas related to feeding snakes including:
- Where to get food
- Live vs Frozen/Thawed vs Pre-killed
- How much to feed
- How often to feed
- Getting food for snakes
- The first thing you need to figure out when it comes to your snake’s food is where you can go about getting it. If you’re only dealing with a few smaller sized snakes you can easily get your food from the local pet store. Just tell them you want feeder mice or rats and few a few dollars they’ll sell you some. If you’re dealing with larger snakes, or multiple snakes it would be a good idea to setup a relationship with a vendor who sells snake food. There are several vendors online who will ship you whole frozen mice, rats, guinea pigs, and other critters. Rodent Pro is one that you see often online. There are many others just look for them with your favorite search engine. While ordering online is convient it might not always be the most practical. Sometimes finding a local source will suit your needs much better.
No matter if you buy locally or online you should keep a few things in mind for the best experience:
- Have a backup plan
- Suppose your supplier runs out, goes out of business, or whatnot. You still need to be able to feed your snakes. Even if you don’t use them locate another source that will meet your needs and establish a relationship with them.
- Cleanliness is important
- The last thing you want is to introduce something harmful to people or snakes in your home because the place you bought them has no cleanliness standards. I’ve been in pet stores where their feeder mice were covered with urine and their own defecation. Not to mention the ones that were lying dead in the bottom of a cage that didn’t look like anyone had even looked at in over a month. That’s the last place you’d want to buy anything, let alone food for a beloved family member.
- Cost of the food
- People seem to have this idea that because snakes eat so little (in comparison to other animals) that they are cheap to feed. Fact is that everything is cheap to feed until you start having to buy it food, pay shipping, or for gas to get it. You should never base anything, let alone how well you care for your snakes, on the cost of food alone, but be considerate of the cost. A kingsnake or ball python will only cost you a couple of dollars a week to feed, but something like a reticulated python could end up costing you much, much more.
- Live, pre-killed, or frozen/thawed?
- This is a subject which is debated all over the internet (at least among those who care) and the only thing for sure is that no one agrees one way or another. The point of this article isn’t to debate, but to give you some information about all three kinds of feeding.
- Live food
- When using this method you “toss” the living animal in with the snake and let the snake do its thing. This most closely mimics nature as most snakes are not scavengers, but some like the brown tree snake appear to be to one extent or another. Live feeding is generally the easiest way to get a snake to eat since stalking, and killing their prey is what they would normally do. It is a very simple process.
- Buy prey
- Introduce prey to snakes dominion
- Wait a few minutes and watch the snake do its thing
Sometimes things don’t go quite that well and at this point the disadvantages of live feeding become apparent. So here’s a few safety and sanity tips for you (and your snake).
- Remove the prey
- If the snake hasn’t killed and eaten the prey item within about 30 minutes remove it from the snakes home. Rats have been known to eat snakes alive if left alone with a snake because a snake could careless about it unless it is hungry.
- Never leave it unattended
- Never leave your snake and its dinner date unattended. Not even for a few minutes. Even if a snake attacks and kills the critter there is still a risk of injury particularly when it first strikes. You want to be aware if the prey has bitten the snake or something like that.
- Give it a home
- If your snake doesn’t eat the prey right away be prepared to give it a home for a few days until you try again. Or if you’re like me you might just prepare to give it a home from then on. Either way invest in a bit of food, water and a secure confine. You could also kill and freeze it in order to feed it later and in a bit we’ll talk about feeding frozen/thawed.
- Pre-kill the food
- Another method of feeding is to kill the animal just prior to feeding it to your snake. This eliminates the safety concerns mentioned above in regards to feeding live prey. There’s a right way and there’s a wrong way to go about killing prey for your snake. A humane way and an inhumane way. Wrong ways:
- Scissors to half decapitate it
- Needles to stab it
- The bottom of your shoe
- Hairspray
- Drowning
- Throwing against a wall
- Garrot
I could probably go on for hours, but you get the idea. If you intend to kill and immediately feed then you can break the animals neck. For a smaller animal like a mouse or rat pin its neck at the base of the skull using a spoon or something similar. Then left up on its back legs. Do it like you mean business and get it over with. There’s no need to make it suffer. Basically you are hyper extending it’s neck and paralyzing it. Because it is so fresh this is often a good way to switch your snake from live to frozen/thawed. If the snake won’t take it just wrap it up and freeze it. You can always use it later.
- Frozen/Thawed
- For years the prevailing thought was that snakes don’t eat anything except for live (or very recently dead) food. Then one day, and God knows why, someone decided to attempt feeding their snake a thawed out critter. I wasn’t there and I don’t have any reference to who it was, when, or the exact conditions nor does it really matter. It only matters that it is a concept that works. Very well.
We’ll start by assuming that you buy rodents from a supplier that come frozen. It depends on what you’re thawing out, but generally about 2 hours before I am going to feed I will take the snakes dinner out of the freezer, put it in a ziplock bag and put the bag in hot water. Notice I said hot and not boiling. You don’t want to cook the animal you want to thaw it out and bring its body heat up so the snake will take heed of it. Generally I go through three changes of water with the last one being for the sole pupose of increasing the heat signature of the snakes food. Then I grab the rodent by the tail with a pair of pliers and “dance” it around near the snake. Try not to crowd the snake and get it defensive. The last thing you need is for the snake to become afraid of its food because you keep bashing it over the head with a dead carcass.
Rather than paying extra to have frozen rodents shipped you can always make your own Co2 chamber. This works great if you buy live and want a humane and easy way to dispatch of the animals. These chambers are fairly simple to build as you can see by these plans I found on ball-pythons.net courtesy of user elevatethis.
I personally prefer feeding frozen thawed. I’ve been through the whole live feeding thing and it was nothing short of ugly. I can’t tell you how many mice and rats I’ve “adopted” over the years, or how many times my snakes have been gnawed on. It’s not for everyone and not all snakes will make a switch to frozen/thawed, but if they do and you’re willing it can make your life so much easier.
Those are the three primary methods of feeding a snake. There is also a technique called force feeding but it is NOT recommended except in dire circumstances like the snake is starving to death as it can stress the snake terribly.
- How much to feed
- One question I hear a lot is “How much should I feed my snake?” The answer has everything to do with your snake and nothing to do with anyone else’s opinion. I’ve heard people say you that snakes will eat until you stop offering them food, but I’ve never experienced that. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen just that I’ve not had that “pleasure”. More often my own experience has been that snakes are extremely picky eaters.
Judge for yourself what size of a meal to give your snake. A good rule of thumb is to make sure the snake only ingests something that is as big around as it is at the widest point and no larger. If the prey is way to big the snake will often try but give up on it. If it does get get something down that is to large you’re running the risk of the snake becoming overstretched which could lead to internal injury and apparently an issue with heat retention. In the February 2008 issue of Reptiles magazine there’s an article about using infrared imagining on a Green Tree Python entitled Heat Seeker. One thing they discovered was that the snakes scales, which cover the skin are warmer because they help to retain the heat. When they fed larger meals to one group of snakes the scales were stretched and the snake lost heat more rapidly.
We discovered that the python’s scales and skin give off two different temperatures. At the edge of every scale, where the skin is visible, a small drop in temperature occurs…
This is the reason snakes spend countless hours under a heat source after a meal. Their stretched bodies lose heat from the exposed skin between the scales… - Source: Feb. 2008 Reptiles page 40-41 by Shiloh Hawkesworth
The other problem with overfeeding is that it can’t cause your snake to regurgitate its meal which can lead to death. I won’t get into the details but each time a snake regurgitates it loses important electrolytes in its digestive tract. These take about 14 days to redevelop, but the problem is that a snake that has regurgitated once is very likely to do the same thing at the next feeding unless you take some serious steps to try and head it off.
So clearly you don’t want to feed to large a prey item to your snake nor to many of a small prey item. Aside from the physical size of the prey item I judge it like this. Is the snake fat? If so I cut back. If it’s looking scrawny I’ll throw an extra feeding of a smaller sized meal in for the middle of the week. Just use common sense and you should be fine.
- How often should you feed a snake?
- This goes hand in hand with “how much”, but it is better addressed separately. The average snake, being a young adult, is usually fed once every 1 to 1.5 weeks. I know that’s a blanket statement, but that seems to be the average. Younger snakes generally need more food due to their rapid growth rates. My baby ball python eats twice a week. One full grown mouse on Monday evenings and one fuzzy mouse on Friday nights. Within the next 3 to 5 weeks I expect to up that to 1 small rat and 1 mouse a week if all goes well.
Every snake is different in regards to how often they’ll eat. If you just use some good ol’ fashioned common sense you’ll see what kind of a pattern your snake has. Respect that pattern and your snake will eat as often as it needs to. Of course it helps to know if your snake is hungry in the first place. With most snakes that’s fairly easy.
- It is intent on you (or something else like a dog)
- The tongue is going 100 miles a second
- It moves in an aggressive manner
- One of mine “yawns” several times in a row and I know to get the mouse ready. I guess I’m pretty well trained