Ruppert ate 2 rat pinkies last night.
I read somewhere that baby rats with a milk line on their belly (these babies were 2 days old) isn't good for a baby snake.
Is the calcium too high in the rat pinkies or what?
Did I read it wrong and rat pinkies really ARE good for them? I just want to feed my snake the right way.
I was tired when I read the article and I can't find the site I was on. I need to get my bones to bed earlier these days! Dang internet! lol

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The only thing I've ever read about juvenile rodents not being good for snakes is that since thier bones aren't done growing they might not provide the snake with enough calcium if that's all it ate fore it's lifetime. This is questionable information however and I don't think you have to worry about Ruppert eating pinkies the rest of his days Additionally I don't think there is such a think as "too much calcium" in nursing rodents and even if there was his kidneys are more than capable of taking care of it.

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What you are thinking of is the fact that new born pinkies don't have much bone structure and therefore are a bit low in the calcium dept. As they grow the skeleton develops that worry is alleviated. However since we have seen hundreds of generations of captive bred snakes being fed newborn pinkie mice I don't think it is nearly as much of a problem as some say. Maybe if you fed nothing but new born pinks for an extended period of time a problem might develop but since as the snake grows the size of the food does too. I have never heard that feeding pinkies with milk in their stomach was a bad thing. Snakes in the wild would consume entire nests of pinks with milk in their stomach.
Rats have more meat on them than comparably sized mice. When I changed my corns from mice to rats pups the growth rate greatly increased.

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Thanks you two!
He was eating small mice before but we just had a batch of rat babies born and decided to switch him over to rats right away. (Before he got 6 foot long and I had to feed him 20 mice at a time! lol)

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