 |
Back to Hognose Snakes Forum Forums Home Members Area
Hognose Snakes Forum
Orni JackAsp |
| Member | Message | ||
|
Orni View Profile |
Few questions about my first hognose.
I know I shouldn’t feed him for about 10 days. When I do start feeding him, how many pinkies should I let him eat each feeding? I read 1-2 mice per feeing and twice that amount for growing snakes. Is this correct? I’ve only kept uromastyx before so feeding mice is foreign to me.. |
||
| 05/06/08 08:50am |
|
||
|
JackAsp View Profile |
Message To: Orni In reference to Message Id: 1726823 Few questions about my first hognose.
As long as the feedings are no more often than every 5 days, I don’t think ANYBODY is going to accuse you of powerfeeding if you let a snake that young eat all he wants. Mine was eight months old when I got her, and ate two small fuzzies every five days, which was about twenty per cent her pre-meal body weight. At about 12-13 months she slowed down and started sometimes taking fewer, so I switched her to every 6 days. At a year and a half, I still feed her every six days, but now she takes three large hoppers. About ten per cent her empty weight. Which is over ten times what her empty weight was last June, so apparently, while still being safely spaced out, these feedings have constituted a growth-friendly regimen. What I do is buy a bag of a hundred mice (by the time the fuzzy bag was finsished, it was time to buy a hopper bag) and sort them into different ziplocks for different weights, mark them, and use up the smallest ones first. Bebe was big enough for fuzzies when I got her. I bought a hundred, and found everything in there from 2 grams to 10 grams. Get the mice, sort them, and guess a number of mice for his first meal, starting with the smallest ones you’ve got. One is a perfectly acceptible trial number. He might not even eat that the first time. Then, if, last time he ate your snake was still looking for another mouse afterwards, it’s time to make the next meal one mouse bigger, but usually as he grows you’ll be working up to bigger mice anyway, so it’s a self-adjusting system. Sometimes it adjust the other way, too, like if you have a bag with a lot of freakishly large fuzzies in it he might suddenly drop from eating three at a time to two at a time when he hits those. Then his growth will catch up and you’ll notice him eating much faster or looking around more afterwards, and you can take the hint. With live, it’s more complicated, since you have to settle for whatever size mice the pet shop happens to have. I used to go by the rule of three, back when I fed live. If it took more than three pinkies to fill a snake up, it was time to move up to fuzzies. If it took more than three fuzzies, time for hoppers. But the problem with that is that unless you have a scale around it is pretty much impossible to tell a 5 gram mouse from an 8 gram mouse, or a 1.2 gram mouse from a 1.8 gram mouse, even though in both cases one meal is almost twice the size of the other. If you can just look at the callendar and see "Okay, he ate three four gram mice last time... I’ve only got two left in the four-gram bag though... okay, let’s try two fours and a five!" then it’s just so much simpler. A couple other things worth mentioning: With frozen, vitamins stay fresh for about six months. They don’t poof away into thin air after that, but they do start to deteriorate. So if you feed him one or two mice per meal, they’re going to be pretty old by the time you get to the end of a wholesale bag. I’ve only got one snake small enough to eat mice, so even though she could handle adult mice I give her multiple hoppers instead. Her empty weight is over ten times what it was in June, her energy is great, and her muscle tone is quite solid, so I’m satisfied with the results. And the other thing: Pinkies and fuzzies are way easier to handle than they look. Not only are snakes built to swallow gigantic things, but mice are built to squeeze INTO tiny things. On top of that, a baby hognose doesn’t even understand that there are food items it can’t swallow, so what looks intimidating to us just smells like food to them. And for the final bonus, the mouse’s bones are still very soft, so if they have to crush down a bit to fit in the belly better, they will. Come to think of it, the baby snakes are more elastic at that age, too. There’s a very good chance that the real question should be "how many fuzzies?" Is he about this size?
If so, fuzzies should be no problem whatsoever. They’re also have more calcium than pinkies. I actually started out feeing her the largest ones first, because when I got her she came with hookworms and I preferred to inject the medicine down the dead mouse’s throat to doing it down the live snake’s throat. But I could only manage that with a very large fuzzy. Once those were gone, I started working up through the smaller ones, but it certainly wasn’t because they were all she could swallow. |
||
| 05/07/08 02:58am |
|
