Pet Snakes - Python diet

I'm Tim Cole, the owner of Austin Reptile Service and I've been keeping reptiles and amphibians for over forty years. Let's address the diets of a python. Pythons, like all other snakes, are carnivorous, so they're meat eaters. There's a variety of species of pythons. Some pythons stay very small, like a Children's Python or Spotted Pythons average about three feet. And yet, the largest snake in the world is the Reticulated Python, which can get up in the mid-twenties feet. So, diet's going to depend on how big that snake is. A baby Children's Python would start out on baby pinkie mice. Baby Burmese Python would start out on almost adult mice. And so on. You want to provide a food item that is not much bigger around than the body diameter of that snake. After the snake has been feeding for a while, and it's established, you could give it a little bit larger meal, but you don't want to overdo it. Baby pythons could feed every four or five days. An adult python could feed once or twice a month, depending on the snake. We do not feed our pythons live food, but we feed them food that's been thawed out, previously frozen, commonly referred to as "frozen thawed-out food". Most of your pythons will feed on frozen rodents. It just has to smell like their food. The reason we do this is so that our pet pythons do not become injured or maimed or killed by a live rodent. When you put a live rodent in the cage with a live snake, you have two animals that are fighting for their lives. Some people say, "Well, that's the normal thing." It is -- in the wild. In the wild, the snake will approach the prey on their own terms. But in a cage, they don't have a choice. And it's not always the snake that wins. The snake will not kill a rodent to protect itself. It will only kill a rodent because it's hungry.