Why is feeding snakes frozen mice better for them opposed to live ones (aside from ethics)? Wouldn't the act of catching their prey be better for their bodies? I'm not trying to debate, I'm just curious why frozen would be better over not
This is a really great question and thank you for asking it!There are many reasons to choose frozen/thaw mice over live besides the ethics involved with watching an animal kill another animal and eat it when it’s really not necessary for the health or happiness of your predatory pet.1. It’s more convenient to buy 500 frozen mice in bulk than it is to buy 500 live mice and keep them alive for the span of 500 reptile meals.
2. It is cheaper to buy 500 mice all at once for bulk pricing than it is to buy a single mouse 500 times and pay full price each time.
3. Live mice grow bigger, get older, change nutritionally over time as they age. Frozen mice stay the same size for as long as they are frozen and will, if properly stored, retain the same nutritional content as the day they were frozen.
4. Live mice may carry live internal parasites. Frozen mice only carry frozen and dead internal parasites, if any at all.
5. Live mice generally want to stay alive and will do anything within their small mousey power to not become dead. This can include attacking and injuring or even killing their predator. While in the wild we might consider a mouse who severely injured or killed a snake a bit of a badass, in the reptile keeping hobby a $3 mouse who kills a treasured and potentially very expensive pet snake is a nightmare.
6. Being grabbed by a mouth full of sharp teeth and then squeezed to death hurts a very lot. Proper CO2 euthanasia, while not without its own set of complicated ethics questions, is relatively less painful and considered generally quite humane. Cervical dislocation, when done properly, is almost completely painless and very humane (though less convenient and requiring more effort and skill than CO2). Everything deserves a humane death, regardless of why they’re dying.
7. Some people believe that feeding live prey promotes aggression in reptiles. I personally have not seen any evidence to support this but I think if I were given the conscious choice of teaching my snake that “wiggling and moving” = FOOD versus “lying relatively still” = FOOD and “wiggling/moving” = PROBABLY MAYBE NOT FOOD I’d prefer the latter for the sake of my wiggly hands.
8. Reptiles sometimes don’t eat their food right away. It’s not unusual for even very well cared for animals to refuse a food item for various reasons, especially if they’re conditioned to expect that food will appear again at the next regular interval. If you were to, say, drop a live mouse into your pet snake’s tank and the snake wasn’t hungry and decided not to eat, how long would you wait to take the mouse out? Like, a few hours? A day? What would you do with this live and now unwanted mouse? I may occasionally be in a rush and put a thawed mouse in my snake’s enclosure overnight and if it doesn’t get eaten by morning it’s no huge hassle to take a slightly smelly thawed mouse out of the enclosure and toss it to my carnivorous roach colony. I can’t say that I would feel as comfortable leaving a live animal with gnawing teeths and claws and will to survive in an enclosed space with my rather derpy reptile pet who lets me touch their eyeballs without seeming to notice, let alone care.9. Body condition-wise, having constant access to various forms of enrichment is going to be better for your snake’s health and well-being than maybe two minutes of “exercise” once every week or so before they eat. If they do already have constant enrichment opportunities, then that two minutes of “hunting” is really not necessary.10. I can’t actually think of any situation in which live feeding is easier, safer, cleaner, cheaper, or more convenient than frozen/thaw feeding. Sometimes a reptile will only eat live and refuse frozen/thaw, which I do understand, but that’s the animal’s preference and not the preference of the keeper. The only reason I’ve ever seen people genuinely prefer it as a means of feeding their reptile pets is for the gross spectacle of watching a living thing kill another living thing, which is honestly bad for all parties involved and bad for the image of the hobby in general. We need to be portraying reptile keepers as ethical, humane, caring and nurturing people who happen to care a lot about animals that don’t necessarily have fur or feathers.…And who also care about animals who do have fur and feathers, which is one of many very valid and carefully considered reasons why we feed frozen/thaw.
