Lol I know right thats got to be the best one I have ever heard!!!
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Dear user: artis-serpitarium. That is actually, not the definition of āpower feeding.ā This would most SIMILAR to their natural feeding in the wild.
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I would have to disagree. As adults we eat three meals a day with a small snack here and there. Babies eat non-stop during the first 1-2 years, and as growing children it slows a bit but the amount is increased. Iāve always considered how all babies eat, and the frequency is much higher than adults.
BTW, this is in response to the above comment on getting a human baby to adolescent size by 5 years old.
Mike, Iāve always taken into account these animals are instinctive and will do whatever it takes as hatchlings, to eat more than we think they should, grow quickly, and reproduce as quickly as possible. They arenāt concerned about how many times or how often theyāre supposed to eat as hatchlings. Their main goal in life is survival.
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The wild is a much different place than captivity. In the wild they have to move to search for food, water, and heat. They struggle to survive and eat whenever the opportunity arises because they never know when the next one is coming.
Basically what you have told us Mike, is that you donāt care much for the lives in your care, only that you can push them faster to make money faster. You care about the almighty buck instead of letting your animals grow and mature at a slower pace. Breeding and producing faster is your main goal. Every day??? Thats insanity! No wonder there are so many obese animals in captivity because people like you push their animals to the limit just to make money faster and tell everyone else its ok and because you are a big name they believe you!
Iām actually kinda happy you posted this. Now I know to NEVER buy an animal from you. Anyone who truly cares about their ANIMALS would never push their bodies through such rapid growth, you care about the money they bring, period.
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Do me a favor, when they die, post the necropsies. Id bet money those animals will be loaded with more fat than is healthy. Or they die of fatty liver disease/liver cancer. There is plenty of research to show you that over feeding leads to liver disease and cancer. Every 24 hours is not giving that animal time to completely digest, absorb and convert nutrients to what their body needs.
Such rapid feeding leads them to grow faster yea, but store the excess as fat and expell the waste in preperation for the next meal. Just because pythons have a faster metabolism doesnāt mean they should be powerfed like this. Only someone concerned with profit alone would do this. They are living animals, not ATM machines.
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Looks like someone else missed a few points and while yes wild and captivity are often different especially when it comes to basic husbandry, some things whether it is in the wild or in captivity are just encoded in the animalās DNA, being and ambush predator with a strong food drive at an early age is just one of them.
Point you missed
The feeding regimen is not all that different as far as amount goes.
A ball python will grow more quickly if fed a 20 gram meal daily instead of a 100 gram meal every 5 days.
Itās not forever
It must be noted that once they are breeding size (500-600grams) I resume normal feeding about every 2 weeks.
Does not work on every animal so you canāt force it.
I have only used this method on fresh hatchlings. The pinstripe had just hatched. If the snake does not cooperate then you are out of luck.
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Youāve landed on my do not do busniess with list too since you want to defend this. This is gross power feeding only for faster profits.
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Who said I would want to sell to you anyway? 
The difference is that when I read some information I am capable of fully comprehending what I read, I know the difference between this practice and power feeding and I do not make assumptions.
Does that mean that I would do this or have done this? No, however again that does mean that I do not find the information interesting because unlike some people I believe that no matter how long you have been doing something you can still learn.
If you are keeping animals and do not experiment around on any level you are not learning anything from them wether itās husbandry, incubation etc, and to me if you donāt try to learn you truly do not care.
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Of course itās not forever. Just long enough to make money on them and then sell them to someone else.
Iām well aware that theyāre not humans. Wreckroomsnakes was actually the one who said āitās no different than people eating multiple meals to keep their metabolism upā.
Feel free to direct all of the comments about how stupid that is to the person who made the comment, not the person responding to them. Thanks 
Itās WAY different because human and reptile physiology are completely different. Iām not the person ignorant enough to bring that argument up, I was simply pointing out how nonsensical it was.
Mike Iām curious, how many of these adults that are powerfed as babies do you keep for more than a few years? They all get sold and replaced with new, more expensive males, correct? How would you know if there are long term effects?
Hereās an article explaining the toll that eating has on a reptileās body. They are not people, they are not built to eat every day. You keep acting like you did some scientific study but all you did was send snakes to someone and then fed your males every day as babies. You have no long term data or even short term data on the effects this has on the animals other than ātHeY mAkE mORe FaStErā. That is not science.
Saying you care about the animals after making a post talking about breeding them as quickly as possible to make more money is laughable. You absolutely can care about them AND make money, but you definitely have those in the wrong order.
Whatās the average age of breeder male you have mike? How many of those were powerfed? Iām genuinely curious to see your 15-20 year old males doing fine, because Iām sure you keep them that long and know theyāre healthy long term.
By the way mike, I appreciate the jabs but I have a serious personal question for you in addition to the others: why do my snakes consistently sell for more than yours do? Better quality? Bigger name? Or maybe I just actually care about them and people can tell. What do you think? All of my breeder friends list higher than no names and get their asking price, but youāre the opposite. You actually get LESS than nobodies. Why do you think that is?
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So you are busting his balls ( no pun intended) for making a profit then go on to brag that your snakes sell for more than his?? And the award for hipocracy goes toā¦
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My comment about it not really being any different than a person eating multiple small meals was just in reference to keeping the metabolism at a high level. If you are not able to comprehend the comparison that is not my problem.
Your getting back lash for your comment
is your own fault, that was a āstupidā comparison and had nothing to with metabolism which what my comment was about. Thanks 
Your article is basically regurgitated information from previous studies on the digestion of a burmese python and other pythons. Although fascinating as it was to read
- it didnāt reveal any new information on the point at hand, which is does it cause harm to animal to feed it more than what is considered the ānormā or safe.
- it focused more on larger āsit and waitā predators like burmese that get considerably larger than a ball python who expend way more energy to get said meal.
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I donāt mean this as an attack. And as a disclaimer, Iām not personally going to use his regimen with my animals. Iām just wondering if you might have missed that as far as I understand, he is suggesting to feed prey items 1/5th the size of the āstandardā every day instead of one lump feeding every 5 days. The result is the same biomass (and approximately nutrition) ingested on a weekly basis, just distributed incrementally.
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I read through that article and I couldnāt find a mention of positive or negative effects of the differing metabolic states. It looks like that study was just examining the āhowā of biological pathways that modulate digestive function that allows for pythons to endure prolonged fasting periods. So @wreckroomsnakes question regarding scientific study regarding positive/negative effects of prolonged heightened metabolic state remains unanswered.
For all the virtue signalling about fasting the animals, there is actually some possibility that it might be healthier to feed smaller meals daily adding up to the same mass of food over the week. Neither side has the answer on this one without a rigorous study. Although itās looking like there is anecdotal evidence supporting that itās not inherently dangerous either way.
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No, Iām calling him out for not caring about the health of his animals and worrying more about making a profit. Big difference between making money and making money at the cost of your animalsā well-being.
Correct me if Iām wrong, but IIRC mike and Bob Clark just worked together to breed a Burmese python female at 18 months and then bragged about it. Tell me more about how thatās fine with you.
You compared the metabolism of humans to that of snakes to justify what mike is doing. Thatās not me making an argument, I quoted you. My response was to show you how ridiculous of a comparison it was.
Snakes and humans are not the same. The metabolism of snakes and humans are not the same. The fact that youāre doubling down on this comparison is astonishing.
What was it Mike said? āGo watch some TV with your snakeā. Iām sure it loves you, theyāre just like people.
The point of this article was not to show powerfeeding vs fasting; I never claimed it was. The point was to show the effect feeding has on snakes. Iām not quoting the paper directly, but something like 40% of the energy from the meal is used just for digesting it.
The main takeaway should be that the function of the heart, kidneys, liver, etc all increase by something like 40x during eating/digestion. It would be a far stretch for me to believe that itās a coincidence that this is the case and also that many powerfed animals die from organ failure. Thatās not a coincidence.
If you want to powerfeed your animals, more power to you. The only reason I know of mike is because of his powerfeeding. Most people Iāve talked to thought this post was a joke because they couldnāt believe heād do this let alone advocate it, but sadly this is what he built his business on. Thatās why his animals sell for less than everyone else, thatās why it takes him longer to sell his animals.
Iāve seen at least a dozen people try to build a business on the same model as mike, and not one of them is still breeding. Take that as you will. I implore anyone reading this to take the animals health into consideration.
This is not virtue signaling, spend time talking to people who have been doing this for longer than mike and care more about money and ask them about death rates, organ failure rates, and reproduction failure rates of animals that are grown too fast, too big, or both. If you want to last long term, do it right.
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Something to consider is smaller intact meals, especially those with less fur, require less energy to consume than a larger intact meal. Iāve noticed an increase in food conversion efficiency just feeding two smaller sized food items per week vs one normally sized item. Their metabolism handles smaller meals more efficiently than it does larger meals from my observations. The study on burms was done with normally sized food items from what I see, itās not really apples to apples. If they have the same initial metabolic response regardless of meal size, I would guess this is a relatively safe practice for adolescent and juvenile snakes. As pointed out above, we have a lot of anecdotal information among us, but no concrete research on the books. Maybe if we all applied what information we have constructively, as I believe Mike was trying to when he started the thread, we might find the answer among ourselves.
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Where did i say snakes metabolism was the same as humans and i was not justifying anything that mike said, so please donāt act like you know what i meant by anything. All i was trying to say was that with eating multiple small meals keeps the metabolism up and the digestive track in a constant state instead of stoping and starting like during a fasting period. You posted the article to tell us something that was already stated in the study done by the university that used mikeās snake almost verbatim. Thanks!
Power feeding is feeding LARGE meals closer together. Most people on here including myself are in agreement that this is something they wouldnāt do with their animals but appreciate the information. This is how we learn and grow in this hobby ( well most of us). I would love for someone to please show an actual study with actual information that shows this kind of feeding regiment leads to organs failure and early death, not just conjecture and i heard from joe blow on facebook who runs (insert facebook group here). I love to learn new things about these animals even if it may go against what is consider āthe normā
Interesting that your go to is insults. Guess i will go back to watching tv with my snakes. 
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