Safe to digest in cool hide?

[kiiarah]

Hi everyone,

I think I have good news, as well as a question. It would seem that Shesha finally took his F/T rat. I say it would seem that way because we kept only his night bulb on and he pulled the rat into his hot hide after a few less than successful attempts to swallow it backwards. He is lying still now, but also remaining in his cool hide. So as of right now he either ate the rat or lost interest and it is in the hide with him. I don't want to lift the hide to check and risk disturbing and stressing him but I am concerned that he is not going back to his hot hide to digest.

He took a liking to the cool hide after I added the heat lamp yesterday and has been in it every since. It is smaller than his hot hide, but up until yesterday he had not even gone into the cool one. So I guess I am hoping someone can tell me if it is safe to let him digest on the cool side or should I maybe switch the hides and see if that encourages him to go to the hot side. I just feel like I should let him be but I want to be sure that staying over there poses no danger to him, especially since the hot hide is larger and he may need the heat but want the smaller hide now. (I will be picking up an identical hide asap but at the time the store only had one small hide so I had to grab a medium one too). His ambient temps are a stable 80 degrees.

(The hot hide temps are measured by a digital thermometer probe in direct contact with the glass over the UTH, and the UTH is regulated by a thermostat to keep it at a stable 88-91 degrees)