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Sometimes your snake may bring up a mouse that he's partially eaten. This could happen if he's scared when he's eating. If this happens a lot for no good reason, you should take your pet to the vet. If your snake refuses to eat even after a couple of hours with privacy, you should flush the uneaten mouse and dry again in a couple of days.

If your snake will not eat thawed mice, you'll have to feed him fresh mice which means a trip to the pet store every week or the desire to keep live mice. If you want to keep live mice I can attest that they are wonderfully interesting creatures, very clean if given the opportunity to be clean (they groom themselves like cats), and quite intelligent. I learned a lot about friendship watching two mother-mice trade off babysitting duties; one would tend all the young together while the other would go for food. If you are keeping or buying live mice for your snake, feeding him live pinkies is completely safe. When your snake grows and hungers for full-grown mice, you should be more cautious. A mouse can injure of even kill your pet when it is cornered and fighting for its life - not to mention that death by snake is a rather crewel way to go. If your snake proves to be a deadly force to all rodent-kind you might be able to get away with feeding him live healthy mice, but there is still a real risk to the health of your pet.

Most snakes will eat a freshly killed mouse without feeling the need to kill it themselves. In this case, the cleanest and most humane way to kill a mouse is cervical dislocation. This is the standard way to kill a lab mouse in scientific settings. Mice are naturally gentle and will somewhat grudgingly let you pick them up without nipping at you. To perform a cervical dislocation you must hold the mouse's body firmly in one hand, exposing the head between your thumb and index finger. With your off hand, you then tug firmly on the mouse's head, severing the spine and killing the mouse quickly and painlessly. If you find this sort of thing disturbing, you might want to rethink the idea of having a pet snake - you might just need to do this to keep your pet healthy and well fed.

The last thing I feel I should mention is mites. They are a nasty pest that look like extremely tiny spiders that live between the scales on your snake and can cause him long-term harm. You likely won't even notice them on your snake unless you look for them. When I bought Gaston, I had made the mistake of buying him from a corner pet shop

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