Alice waiting to be put back into her habitat
I made what my be my final attempt to get Alice back on rats today. I went to the Atlanta Repticon and talked a bit with one of the guys from Mice Direct. I may have figured out what happened that started this whole “I don’t want rats for dinner thing”. When I was feeding Alice medium rats and the size required for her increased but not so much that large rats were an option, I started adding mice to her feedings after she ate the medium rat. It was during this time that she seemed to lose interest in the rats. I should have been supplementing with rat pups instead of the mice. So I ended up buying a live rat pup for Alice in hopes that she would take the live rat pup and opening the door to following that with frozen rats. No dice. As soon as she caught the scent of the rat she lost interest in it. I had purchased a 10 pack of frozen adult mice and ended up feeding her some of those. So the lesson is never give mice once you have a snake on rats. You might end up like me and have a 6 foot long snake that needs to be fed 5 or more mice at a time to be satisfied.
When feeding Alice mice I usually hold them by the tail and let her take it out of my fingers. On one of the mice I held on a little longer and her teeth grazed my one of my knuckles as she was grabbing the mouse away from me. It did not feel like anything had happened and I went on feeding her. I looked down at my hand a little later and could see the blood on my knuckle. I washed it off later and could see that only one tooth broke the skin. Very interesting.