The one downside to feeding in the cage

[Jim Smith]

Like many of you, I find that feeding my snakes in their cages is both easier for me and less invasive/stressful on my snakes. I have however discovered one downside to this practice. I keep my snakes in "display" cages with SaniChip bedding, hides decorations and plastic plants. I have one sub-adult female Hondo that is a notoriously picky eater. She turns up her nose at F/T mice so I have reverted to feeding her freshly killed mice, and even then she can be fussy. This week I fed her a freshly killed adult mouse which she grabbed quickly and dragged it behind her hide to eat. I left her to it and checked back in about an hour, looking behind her hide to see if she ate it okay. I figured, it's not there and she's snugly coiled in her hide so it's all good. A couple of days later as I checked everyone before I went to bed, I noticed that one of my large adult hondos left a huge, smelly pile for me to clean up which I promptly did. The next morning, the room still smelled bad and it seemed to get worse as the day went on. By the afternoon, I suspected something else was going on, so I opened the cage to my fussy feeder and was hit in the face with an awful stench. I started removing her "decorations" and found the uneaten mouse behind a back-wall decoration she had moved. This mouse was now was huge with it's legs sticking straight out like a road kill after a week in the Georgia sun. Thankfully, I found it and got rid of it before it "popped", but it still took a couple of hours for the room to stop smelling. So my one bad thing about in-cage feeding is to really double check that your animals have actually eaten all their dinner before you let them curl up nice and cozy in their hides for a couple of days to digest their meal. For those of you who keep their snakes in tubs with newspaper or paper towels for bedding or those who feed outside their cages, this should not be a problem, but if you have your snakes in "display" cages, this is something to keep in mind.