This is Sunset. He gave me such worry by not eating for almost two months back during breeding season. As you can see, he is well over that phase. This is what I call his tightwad pose...
Constricting, then chowing down on his mouse. It is amazing to see how much their heads and necks can stretch to accomodate prey items. Then with a yawn, it all pops back into place.
Without snakes, whose primary prey is mice, we'd be up to our armpits in the little rodents in no time.
For any who might be concerned, the mice I feed are humanely killed in a CO2 chamber. They in no way experience the terror of being attacked and suffocated by a predator of this nature. They simply fall asleep and never wake up.
To me, it seems both silly and cruel to deny any animal its natural food source. Snakes eat mice. Sometimes they eat other things as well, such as lizards, frogs, birds, other snakes--and for the larger ones, things like rabbits and even goats. Snakes are carnivores. Period.
None are vegetarian. It would be a slow and painful death by malnutrition if one were to force a snake to eat fruits and vegetables. Or if the snake were lucky, it could die a relatively quick, yet still painful and cruel death by intestinal impaction from being forced to consume things it cannot, cannot digest.
Yet there are people who would do just that. Try to get snakes to eat vegetables. There are those who believe NO animal should be allowed to eat meat, not even those who were designed to do so.
Animals whose digestive systems were designed to process meat simply cannot be "taught" to eat vegetables. It won't work. They will starve to death.
And which is worse, killing the prey or killing the predator?
3 comments:
I see this a lot with vegetarians who own dogs and cats. Worse they frequently make no distinction between a non-obligate carnivore (like a dog), that can digest vegetables, and can, if carefully managed, just about get by without meat, vs. an obligate carnivore (like a cat), that simply has to eat meat.
As to the pain and suffering of mice - having worked in a rodent lab for a year, I have little sympathy for the little buggers as a race. They inflict as much or more pain and suffering on each other as any outside predator. If some outside source (like snakes) didn't keep the population down, the mice would be killing each other pretty quickly.
I agree with you. Mice are commonly known to eat even their own babies. Even such non aggressive animals like deer, if not controlled by predators would overgraze their habitats and starve themselves to death.
My daughter often caught mice in the chicken feed. She would scoop them out and put them in a bucket with a lid. Then she took them to a friend who owns a snake. One day while moving small hay bales, a mouse ran across the bale. Jesse (wearing gloves) snagged it in mid-leap. She was quite surprised and horrified that she actually caught it. She fed it to her chickens.
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