I took in a male Banana Cal King earlier this year from my local store than someone loved just a bit too much and it’s a good example of why you have to meter your snakes food. He’s cleared quarantine so I’ll breed him after brumation in an effort to knock some of this weight off.
The ‘tiny’ female on top is a 40” 4 year old that’s in excellent body condition for captive breeding. The male below her is twice the girth any California Kingsnake should be. I’ll probably feed him a couple meals when he comes out of brumation to keep him from choosing cannibalism when I pair him. After that I’ll either feed him undersized meals to force him to burn calories digesting them, or just not feed him for a few months. He’s young but he’s in dangerous body condition and definitely at risk for fatty liver disease which I’ve seen take out a lot of overfed snakes.
Wow that is a big boy…
I had a similar situation with my Hypo Brooks King but he was severely overfed as a baby. He was maybe a little longer than a water bottle when I got him but the person I bought him from was feeding him small/med. mice every 5 days when he should have been eating no larger than maybe a small fuzzy once a week.
He has grown into a massive Kingsnake, outsizing all of my other kings by a fair bit but he is in no way overweight like that, just really long.
I get stuck doing a lot of rehab from non profits I work with and the occasional law enforcement seizure. To knock weight off colubrids I generally feed them a rat pinkie or a few mouse pinkies every week. Enough food to cause a metabolic response that will burn calories, but not enough food to support fuel switching where they can use calories from the meal to support digestion. Then every 5th or 6th week I give them a small mouse to make sure they are getting nutrition and their organs aren’t going to crash. I see so many overfed snakes die from fatty liver that I try to bring them down in weight as fast as is safe to do.
Generally when I see overweight kings, they’re brooks kings lol. The local reptile store had one surrendered a couple years ago that almost had a double chin. It was the fattest kingsnake I’ve ever seen.
Good PSA. I feel like as humans, our natural impulse is to show love through food. Family members, friends, pets, wild animals…if we love something, we usually want to stuff it full of tasty treats. It’s just how we do.
But yeah, definitely not healthy for our critters to feed them beyond what their bodies are designed to process. That is a CHONKY kingsnake. Hopefully he’ll go on to live a long, healthy life now that he’s being “loved” a bit less.
I think its because of how ravenous Brooks Kings are. I can’t say so for other Kings since I haven’t owned any other type yet but my god they will eat like they are starving even if they are overweight.
I had a nelsons milk given to me that was thicker than my 7ft coastal carpet python but 3ft long. Looked like a blood python/kingsnake hybrid. Took 8 months of one rat fuzzy every two weeks to slim down enough to try escaping. Former keeper was feeding 5 rat fuzzies every saturday. You could hear him breathing. He was gross. The lady I got him from said her vet told her to feed it like that. I had a convo with that vet. She specialized in livestock.
That’s the thickest king snake I’ve seen, wow! He’s the poster boy for the concept of just because the animal will eat, it doesn’t mean they should eat. I get that people are trying to do something good, and just don’t understand the terrible effects of overfeeding on snakes. I remember being horrified by a @t_h_wyman post explaining that they store fat physiologically very differently from we mammals. Extra fat on them isn’t just extra passing here and there (“hips” notwithstanding). It’s stored in very harmful ways in their bodies. It’s easy more problematic than I think folks realize.
Yeah, I think part of the problem is just that people can have a hard time wrapping their brains around just how infrequently a snake should be eating, and just how long they can fast and be perfectly fine. I remember freaking out when my first snake had refused food for a whole three weeks…which is nothing for a snake (especially an adult boid), but I was used to mammals, so even though I intellectually understood she was fine, it did take some time for me to fully accept how different her physiology and metabolism was from the animals I was used to caring for.
Yup. I remember feeling like I was doing something terrible with my first snake by not feeding when he was in shed. Too many past nights of bottle-feeding baby mammals to feel emotionally like not even offering food for daaaaaayyyys was the correct thing to do.
Just as a point of reference for how long an adult boid can go. I have an adult female ball that has recently come off an eighteen-month hunger strike. Her body composition was/is fine, she was taking in water, she even shed a few times. Over that extended period, she lost 74g from the time I started weighing her just to start keeping tabs on her, which was about four months in to the strike. She probably lost a little more before I started checking her weight, but I would bet on her total weight loss still being less than 100g total
Even colubrids can go great lengths of time. My black milk regularly goes six to eight weeks without food simply because I cannot find her in her cage on feeding day so she misses out until the next one.
