Common Snake Feeding Mistakes

If you are new to owning or raising a pet snake, there is a lot to learn about proper care and feeding. In an effort to help you get up to speed quickly, I'm providing you a short list of some of the most common feeding mistakes and how to avoid them. Some of them seem like common sense, while others are only learned from trial and error or through advice from snake experts.

If you are using frozen feeders to feed your snake, most of the common errors come during the preparation phase of your pet's meal. You need to be able to properly separate and warm the rodents that you will be using. A good reptile food supplier will flash freeze the feeders so that they are easily separated and removed from the container. If you are getting your food in a large frozen block of mice where you have to chip away to get you mice out...find a new supplier. It makes for unnecessary work and cause damage to the feeder, and makes a mess.

Once you have your snake's meal separated out, you need to properly warm them before they are ready to eat. Never try and feed your snake a rodent that isn't thawed all the way through, it is not good for them. The best way is to warm them up in a pot of warm water on the stove. Allow them to warm for several minutes on low temperature until completely thawed. It's not a good idea to boil them, you are trying to thaw them out...not cook them! And do not use the Microwave! Not only is it a bad way to thaw them, but it can go horribly wrong, and you will have one unpleasant mess to clean up. The word 'yuck' is an understatement in this case.

Once you have mastered getting your feeders thawed out, the next place new snake owners often make a mistake in the method that they use to actually feed the snake. Presentation is everything in human food, so too for our reptile friends. You can use your tongs to wave the rodent near the snake so that it can get the scent. If it doesn't take it straight from your tongs don't give up and take it away. You can place it in the opposite end of the feeding enclosure. It may take your snake a bit before it is ready to feed, or it may prefer to 'hunt' its food as opposed to taking it straight from the tongs.

Those are some of the more common mistakes that most new snake owners make when trying to feed their snakes. With a little experience these things will get much easier.

Want to learn more about feeding your snake frozen mice or finding the best suppliers of snake food? Then head on over to snakefoodking.com and use our resources.