Snake Sausages

What the hell?

I was first introduced to snake sausages in the late 90s, when they were all the rage in the UK.

Supplemented feed. Add variety to the diet. Know exactly what you're feeding your snake. Yadda yadda yadda.

So naturally, I bought some.

I went for the 10g, mouse-sized offerings, took them home and defrosted one for my albino Californian kingsnake, Baby.

Baby was a very typical Cali king.

She loved her food.

She'd eat rats, mice, birds—once even a small bird the cat dragged in. Not a great plan, I know, but I was young. She ate a goldfish once. Basically, if something could conceivably fit down Baby's throat, Baby was willing to investigate whether it should.

So I wasn't exactly expecting problems when I offered her the sausage.

Baby approached it.

Tongue flick.

Another tongue flick.

And...

Nothing.

She dismissed it completely.

This was a snake that regarded "Is that actually food?" as more of a philosophical question than a prerequisite for eating it, and even she wasn't interested.

My response was approximately:

What the fu—

Nearly thirty years later

And they're back.

Sausages everywhere.

Not the kilo of Lashfords you grab from the local butcher for the kids' BBQ. Snake sausages.

When I first heard the rumblings around the herpetological world, I was a little surprised. Herpetoculture has come a very long way in thirty years. Our understanding of nutrition, prey quality and feeder-animal husbandry has moved with it.

Some of us, myself included, even breed our own rodents. It gives us control over prey size, diet and condition, and ultimately greater control over what we're putting into our reptiles. I've talked about this before in my multimammate article, so feel free to have a read.

Shameless self-promotion. I love it.

But there's a serious point underneath that. The care of our feeder animals should be every bit as committed as the care of our pets. They need appropriate housing, nutrition, water, hygiene and welfare. Being destined to become food doesn't somehow make the animal before that point irrelevant.

And ultimately, that's what whole prey is.

An entire animal.

Muscle. Organs. Bone. Skin. Connective tissue. Fat. Blood. Gut contents. All packaged together in the proportions produced by an actual living vertebrate rather than assembled according to a formulation.

So, with everything we've learned about whole-prey nutrition and feeder-animal husbandry over the last thirty years, I had one fairly obvious question.

Why do we need sausages back in the diet?

Guess who?

I can't say I was overly surprised when I discovered who had decided snake sausages needed to see the depths of freezers around the UK.

Arcadia.

Arcadia is one of the biggest and most recognisable reptile brands in the country. Lighting, heating, supplements, foods—you'd be hard pushed to spend much time around herpetoculture without encountering the name. Love them or hate them, Arcadia are massive, and they have the resources to develop something like this and launch it properly, complete with advertising, feeding guides and nutritional claims.

Their offering is called EvoRx, a raw chicken-based sausage formulated for snakes and other carnivorous reptiles and marketed as an alternative to frozen rodents.

So let's forget the advertising for a minute and look at what's actually in one.

For a sensible comparison, I'm going to use 10 grams of food on each side: a 10g portion of EvoRx against 10g of juvenile whole mouse. Arcadia publishes its analysis on an as-fed basis, while published whole-prey data allows us to convert the composition of a juvenile domestic mouse back to the same wet-weight basis.

10g of food - Arcadia EvoRx - Whole juvenile mouse

Water                 7.08g                            ~7.13g

Protein               1.66g                            ~1.70g

Fat                      0.83g                            ~0.68g

Ash/mineral      0.37g                            ~0.29g

content 

And I'll give Arcadia their due.

That's surprisingly close.

Protein is almost identical. Moisture is virtually identical. The sausage contains slightly more fat and ash in this particular comparison, but if we're looking purely at the basic nutritional composition of an equal-weight meal, they've done a pretty impressive job of getting their sausage into the same neighbourhood as whole prey.

But—and you knew there was going to be a but—

Those four numbers aren't the entirety of nutrition.

A mouse isn't 17% protein, 7% fat and a bit of calcium with whiskers attached. It's an entire vertebrate animal: muscle, organs, skeleton, connective tissue, skin, blood, fat and gastrointestinal contents. Its nutritional composition also changes with age, condition, diet and life stage. Published whole-prey analyses demonstrate substantial differences even between neonatal, juvenile and adult domestic mice.

So the sausage can get impressively close to a mouse on a nutritional table.

But does that make it a mouse?

No.

And perhaps the more important question is:

Does it need to?

The advertising campaign

And this is where Arcadia lost me.

Because EvoRx isn't only being marketed as another potential food source. It isn't simply “here's something different you could add to your snake's diet.”

One of the major selling points is that you don't have to feed rodents anymore.

Arcadia describes frozen rodents as a potential barrier to snake keeping. Some people don't like handling them. Some households don't want dead rodents in the freezer. Some people have genuine phobias. Their solution is EvoRx: a clean, convenient, rodent-free alternative that can completely replace them. Their own feeding guide tells keepers to replace their normal rodent with the equivalent weight of EvoRx and continue with the same feeding regime.

And that's where I have a problem.

Not with people being frightened of mice or rats. Not with somebody finding a dead mouse unpleasant. Phobias are real, and nobody should be ridiculed for having one.

My question is much simpler.

If you cannot tolerate feeding an animal the food that animal normally eats, is that the right animal for you to keep?

There are thousands of species available to us in captivity. Different diets. Different environments. Different husbandry requirements. Part of responsible animal keeping is choosing an animal whose requirements you are actually comfortable providing.

We wouldn't advertise an insect-free insectivore for somebody who couldn't stand crickets.

We wouldn't remove hay from a rabbit's diet because somebody didn't like having hay in their house.

So why are we trying to solve a human discomfort with whole prey by changing what we feed the snake?

And that's the distinction that bothers me.

What problem are the sausages actually solving?

Because at this point, it doesn't appear to be a problem the snake had.

The real truth

The question quickly becomes: should husbandry products help us meet the biological requirements of the animals we choose to keep—or help us choose animals whose biological requirements we don't actually want to meet?

That, to me, is a much more interesting way of looking at snake sausages.

If we choose to keep a snake, we should be prepared to meet its needs. Heating, lighting, enclosure, environment and, yes, diet included.

If you can't handle having frozen mice in the freezer, don't keep an animal that requires whole prey. Pretty simple, really.

Not everyone will keep a reptile. Not everyone will keep a dog, a cat, a horse or anything else for that matter. That's entirely your choice. There are thousands of animals we can choose to share our lives with, and part of responsible animal ownership is choosing one whose needs we are willing and able to provide.

The animal shouldn't have to change to make itself more convenient for us.

And that's ultimately where I part company with the idea behind the advertising. We've already established that the nutritional composition of these sausages can come surprisingly close to whole prey on paper. That's impressive, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

But close to a mouse isn't the same question as why are we replacing the mouse in the first place?

If you're going to keep an animal, feed it an appropriate diet.

Not a sausage.

Dietary dependency

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that EvoRx does exactly what Arcadia says it does.

Your colubrid accepts it, grows normally and spends its entire life eating nothing but chicken sausages. Arcadia specifically says EvoRx has been designed as a complete lifetime diet for colubrids, so this isn't an unreasonable scenario to consider.

But what happens if the sausages disappear?

Companies close. Products get discontinued. Formulations change. Supply chains fail. Ingredients become unavailable. None of this requires some crazy idiot with a sharp stick and a homemade DEATH TO ARCADIA T-shirt to bring sausage production grinding to a halt.

Sometimes products simply stop existing.

And now you have a snake that has spent its entire life recognising one particular manufactured food as dinner.

What happens when you offer it a mouse?

Interestingly, Arcadia's own feeding information gives us reason to at least ask the question. They acknowledge that snakes can develop habit-based feeding responses and that some individuals require additional work to convert from rodents onto EvoRx. Scent, presentation and established feeding routines can all influence whether the animal recognises the new item as food.

So surely the opposite question is worth asking.

If a snake can become sufficiently accustomed to whole prey that converting it onto a sausage takes work, could a snake raised exclusively on sausages become sufficiently accustomed to those that converting it onto whole prey takes work too?

I don't know.

And, importantly, I haven't found evidence demonstrating that this happens.

But that's exactly why I wouldn't deliberately create the dependency when I don't need to.

Dietary variety doesn't only give us different nutrients, textures, smells and feeding opportunities. It gives us options.

A snake that readily recognises mice, rats, multimammates, chicks, quail and perhaps even the occasional snake sausage as food gives its keeper somewhere else to go when one of those things becomes unavailable.

An animal that recognises only one manufactured product potentially doesn't.

For an extreme example of what dietary specialisation can mean, look at the giant panda—and yes, I mean the bear, not the isopod.

Around 99% of a giant panda's diet consists of bamboo. They're extraordinarily specialised for exploiting it, and when preferred bamboo populations undergo mass die-offs, food availability can become a serious ecological problem. Research following one major bamboo die-off documented an 82.2% reduction in the standing crop of the pandas' preferred bamboo, forcing changes in feeding behaviour and use of alternative bamboo. Other work has linked bamboo die-offs with periods of starvation where pandas cannot move to areas containing alternative supplies.

Obviously, a kingsnake eating sausages isn't a panda eating bamboo. One is learned feeding experience in captivity; the other is an evolutionary dietary specialisation millions of years in the making.

But the broader lesson is useful.

Specialisation reduces your options when the thing you've specialised on disappears.

And that's precisely why I prefer variety.

Not because every individual prey item must be nutritionally superior to a formulated diet. Not because a snake needs a different flavour every Tuesday to stop it getting bored.

Because good husbandry should be resilient.

I'd rather have an animal that recognises six things as food than one that recognises only one.

Especially when that one comes in a packet.