Any suggestions on buying online feeders for a female boa constrictor. There is rodentpro.com perfect prey big cheese lyan labs and so on. Then i came across frost bite feeders. Has anyone had any experience with frost bite feeders
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I have never had a problem with ARS Rodent
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Nope, but Coldblooded Cafe and Layne Labs usually uphold quality.
I recently stopped using Rodentpro because their feeder quality has gone downhill.
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+1 with ARS, I’ve used them for years without problems, and they just recently dropped their order minimum to $100 which is helpful if you don’t need a massive order.
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I live close by so I can pick up instead which saves me a delivery charge.
I take my little dog Rudy with me and they all have to stop what they are working on and pet him. Since Rudy became blind they make over him even more. Everyone working there is super nice.
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I can only give you my experience on Rodent Pro and Layne Labs. Most of my animals will not eat food from these suppliers. Wasted a couple hundred bucks on them. I gave the food to my friend who has birds of prey and they also will not eat them. Maybe they are freezer burned, old, or have a weird smell. Thankfully my most indiscriminate snake (my ball python) will eat from these vendors so she was able to eat the ones that were a size she could take. But the rest was wasted.
What quality drop have you noticed? I’ve used rp off and on for the better part of 2 1/2 decades. Have had occasional poor quality but usually they’re good. I literally just fed 60 snakes rodent pro rats, guinea pigs and mice this evening. All took and ate without a problem.
I will say, local suppliers are my preferred source since I quit breeding my own due to my back, and other health reasons. But that’s usually hit and miss whether they have what I need at any given time.
(Edited to fix a word)
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I produce and freeze my own rodents to feed my animals… the best way I can describe this without showing exact photos of what I’m talking about (I can’t anyway because of Community Guidelines) is this:
They absolutely are not fresh, I’ve compared my own frozen mice that have been frozen longer than a month to a new shipment of RP mice as well to a new shipment of Coldblooded Cafe mice and the RP mice do not look good… I’ve had frequent shipments from RP like this.
They are stiff even fully thawed and warm, like rigid, I don’t believe it is because of Rigor Mortis either- its almost like they are dry. They are completely pale white in areas that should still have a pink-ish color (feet, tail, nose, ears) as if they were drained of blood. I’ve had a couple f/t mice from them that look emaciated, mostly the smaller sizes like fuzzies and hoppers which isn’t a good sign of nutrition, same thing with some rats I’ve purchased. That is not at all acceptable to be feeding to young snakes, let alone as an animal production practice reguardless if they are feeders or not.
Their sizes are not held up to standard, a lot of frozen rodents from them do end up being smaller and weigh less than advertised. I’ve heard a lot of people being reimbursed for this but it keeps happening, they aren’t making changes to fix the issue.
Because of this I simply just do not really trust them as a supplier anymore, sure they are a cheaper option, but its not worth giving my snakes sub-par food… in my opinion.
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Thanks for the reply. That is some significant quality problems. Can’t blame you for not trusting them for your animals.
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Yep it goes to show ya cheaper is not always better……
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I was raising my own feeders up until a few months ago. It wasn’t bad when I had under 30 snakes, but now the work is like a whole second full time job. I had to just quit production for the moment. Maybe I’ll get back into it later idk.
But now that I’m buying feeders again I’m using Big Cheese, and am as happy with the quality as I was in the past. I get the occasional thinner feeder than the rest of the batch, but everything is clean and not freezer burnt.
In the past I have also using Layne Labs, Perfect Prey, and Cold Blooded Cafe. I haven’t used LL in over a decade, and PP almost as long. I find CBC way undersizes their feeders vs BC, so I really only get pigs for the retic from them nowadays.
I have never once gotten a batch of rats/mice I was happy with from Rodent Pro. I had a batch of adult mice that all split down the edge of the rib cage when thawed. No guts spilled out, the tissue was all in place, just for some reason they all split in the same spot…most are very underweight or emaciated, especially rat pinks/pups and fuzzy to hopper mice. The only rat/mouse worth anything from them are pinky mice. I only get non mouse/rat feeders from RP.
I don’t buy from locals because they charge 2-4x the price I can get feeders online, not being hyperbolic.