Question: What do you feed your snakes?

Adam Hargreaves answered on 11 Jun 2017:

Hi WilliamP,

The snakes generally are fed frozen mice (obviously they’re defrosted first!), which for many snakes is the type of thing they’d feed on in the wild. This is also what pet snakes are fed with.

Sometimes for baby snakes they can be reluctant to feed on mice right away, I’m not really sure why. In this case we do various things to tempt them, for example we can scent the mouse with things like the water from canned tuna (sounds weird but sometimes it works!). In the most extreme cases we need to assist feed the snakes, otherwise they won’t keep growing and usually they would starve to death. Obviously in the wild unfortunately not all hatchling snakes would make it, but we like to give every snake a chance. Thankfully, after a few assist feeds they usually start feeding on their own. For this we use a very finely ground dog/cat food which we give them via a catheter (a very fine tube connected to a syringe, which we put down their throat so we can pump the food into their stomach). It sounds quite brutal, but it does absolutely no harm to the snake and it’s actually (from experience) more stressful for the human!