Show Off Your Snakes!

I love that snake blue frog. I have quite a few snakes. but none real. here is one

My real snakes:

My leucistic Texas ratsnake, frog-eyed variety. An old picture when he was a yearling:

My corn snake. He's an anery morph:

I've greeted many a ToTer with my ratsnake around my shoulders, unless it's too cold outside. Usually they're a bit bad tempered, but he's a huge sweetie, as is evidenced by the fact he's not striking at the camera.

a snake I painted.

Having been on the receiving end of rodent teeth a time or two, I'm all too painfully aware of what they can do! Oftentimes shelter personnel are scared of rats so I am always the one who reaches inside the cages of terrified animals who are convinced they're going to die at any second (consider all the cat and dog smells at your average shelter). Normally it's hard to get a domestic rat to bite even under those circumstances but it does happen to even the best of us. Nursing mothers are particularly prone to attacking strangers - again, who can blame them? - and half the time the staff have failed to notice newborns safely tucked under mamas' bodies. Oh, the stories I could tell....

I never cease to be amazed by people who can calmly discuss the gruesome deaths suffered by snakes at the teeth of rats while standing in line to buy... live rats. I always fed pre-killed as well but still can't handle it emotionally any more, so I enjoy playing with my friends' snakes and then come home to my rats. I keep waiting for my friend's female rubber boa to reach breeding age, because I'd take the offspring of her and her eventual mate in a heartbeat. Bonus: they never get big enough to eat even newborn rats.

I wish Mexican black kingsnakes had better temperaments; I know someone who breeds them and would let me have a baby out of her "Lilith" in a heartbeat, but I'm much more in the corn snake/rosy boa/milk snake/rubber boa end of preferences.

Oh heck yeah. No animal bites quite like a rodent. Nature equipped them quite well for self defense. Against snakes, if the rodent gets his/her nerve faced with such a predator, they're bright enough to know just where to clamp, too. I had a friend who had a completely blind garter snake, both eyes rendered nonfunctional by her food.

While emotionally I'm on the same page as you about feeding rodents to snakes, I did a ton of anatomical studies and the like while in college which desensitized me somewhat to the gut reaction part of the process. While I don't -like- feeding even prekilled, I try to think of it as not unlike going to the supermarket and buying meat for myself. I think what bothers most about it is the fact that the mice and rats are still whole and recognizably mice and rats. And then there are the things one must do to rodents to get a non-feeding neonate to eat, which is the primary reason I've not bred any of my snakes. It's hard when you know how intelligent rats and mice are, and what awesome companions they make.

Temperament is huge in my book. As a pet owner rather than a breeder or collector, I personally don't see the point of owning an animal you can't interact with easily and make a part of the family. As such, nearly all my snakes have been corn snakes.