I grow my carpets to 5-6' by one year of age, my spotteds to 90cm or so by one year of age... I feed them well by anyone's standards and I've had mine attempt to swallow my hands or fingers, occassionally getting a whole finger down their throat, I've even had outright obese snakes attempt to eat me. It's nothing to do with being starved, it's a matter of what they recognise as food. On the other side of the coin, I have snakes which will launch themselves at one type of food, but remain utterly disinterested in another, even if very hungry, this is exactly the same as a snake not attempting to eat a human; they (usually) just don't recognise them as food. If a snake recognises people as food, they'll attempt to eat them as readily as they will take a rodent. Extremely hungry snakes don't tend to eat people any more than very well fed snakes, unless you've wiped yourself down with rat urine. If the snakes were attempting to ingest people because they were underfed, but ordinarily wouldn't see them as food, they would attempt to eat wood, rocks etc etc, which clearly isn't the case. A healthy snake should pretty much always be wanting to eat, if you have a snake which refuses food (other than when it's sloughing etc) you're overfeeding it terribly.
Are you trying to say that snakes must be fed until the point at which they refuse food if they are to be safely handled?
zulu wrote: ? this post should have been called the dumbest keepers ever
I guess then it's appropriate that Zulu has been prolific in this thread.
Hix
And it follows that you couldn't resist jumping in
(Yes, I can see the irony, don't worry
)