How do I gas a rat?

Question

First off, I think it's inhumane and potentially dangerous to feed snakes live prey, that's just my opinion and no one is going to change it. That being said, I've found it very difficult to buy adequate sized mice/rats to feed my snakes. It seems the pre-killed frozen mice are either way too small or way too big, so I've been buying live adequate-sized mice and killing them myself. Well, they're starting to eat hopper rats etc, and they're increasingly cute and harder to kill myself. I recently learned about "gassing" rats by putting them in a tupperware container and adding dry ice, but I'm not sure how this works. Would anyone care to explain? Thanks!

Bear in mind, to those who think that death by suffocation is bad, I agree. That's one of the reasons I don't want the snake to kill the rat for me, because it'll be terrifying, painful, and slow for the rat. That's why I'm using alternative methods to kill the rat in a fast and humane manner. As far as I know, using CO2 gas to suffocate is as humane as it gets, so I'm just asking how I go about setting up a system with this.

Answer 1

1. Buy about a 1 or 2 pound chunk of dry ice from the supermarket's butcher or frozen foods department. (It usually costs less than $1/lb)

2. Get a rubbermaid container or similar air-tight box that has a removable lid and steep sides that the prey can't climb out of. If you use a very large container (bigger than 50 gallons), you may need more dry ice.

3. Place the dry ice in the container for about 15 minutes or long enough to fill the container up to the lid with the CO2 gas - This phase change (solid to gas) is called sublimation. During this priming time, care should be taken to keep drafts or wind from sucking the CO2 out of the top, but the top doesn't need to be sealed down because CO2 is heavier than air.

4. Once the container is "primed" (meaning you can stick your lips just inside the container and breath in CO2 gas), drop the prey items into the container and close the lid, wait 5 minutes and then remove your humanely dispatched prey item.

Precautions & Hints:
If you don't prime the container, the animal will know it's suffocating = not very humane.
Build a little cage around your dry ice, (I made a little basket that hung on the wall of the container), to keep the animals from burning themselves on the solid CO2.
If you place the dry ice in some warm water, you won't need to wait as long for the container to prime.
Many grocery stores will give away dry ice when you request it for ice cream or frozen foods you've just purchased - just say you've got a long drive.
There have been countless research projects done concerning this method of euthanasia concerning lab animals used in drug studies (it is unpractical to use drugs to euthanize these animals because it fouls their experiments). The researchers have found that brain activity drastically halted after the first few breaths taken in of 100% CO2 gas. This indicates the suffocating animals seem to loose conciousness very soon even though their body's respond as though they are lucid. This means this method is even more humane than letting your snake constrict the prey because the animal is not counciously experiencing the oxygen deprivation.

Answer 2

Not sure why you're needing to do this, but I'm guessing you are either breeding to feed your snakes or breeding commercially. Otherwise you should just order prefrozen ones in bulk. They are only around $2 each. But to answer your question, the gas that most frozen rodent suppliers use is CO2 gas. The easy way of doing this is to use a cooler and put dry ice in the bottom. Put a wire sheet over the dry ice so that the wire is NOT touching the dry ice. You don't want the rats to come into contact with it as it will burn them and is painful. So then what you do is put the rats into the cooler (on the wire so they are not touching dry ice) and close the lid. The reason this is considered humane is that when a person encounters CO2 gas they black out. Same for rats. So they will suffocate while blacked out and shouldn't be in pain. Alternatively you can hit the rat's head against a hard surface very quickly. If done properly this will kill it... hopefully painlessly. At least that is the theory. Feeding live rats is very dangerous for the snakes as was previously said.

Answer 3

Dry ice is condensed carbon dioxide. When it sublimates, or "melts", it becomes carbon dioxide gas. CO2 is heavier than air, so it will settle to the bottom of a container. This is important because the volume of gas is much higher than the volume of solid. CO2 is the gas mammals release through the respiratory process. If the animal is placed at the bottom of a container, the gas would eventually suffocate the animal. This is not a pleasant thing to experience or even watch. The death through asphyxiation is slow and torturous.

My advice to you would be to continue purchasing pre-killed prey. I've attached a link that may be useful to you. If you need larger food than you can find locally, then look for online suppliers that will ship to you.

Answer 4

Joe Dragon's advice is absolutely correct. The next best method I know of is the 'head whack', which takes a bit of practice but is quick and cheap.

It is MY opinion, just as unchanging as yours, that anyone who cannot deal with feeding prey to a predator has no right to keep the predator. This is not to pass judgement on people who think rats are cute- I think they are as well! However, if you cannot bring yourself to using pre-killed or dispatching them yourself humanely*, you should change pets.

*Humanely here means a way that is known to be quick and relatively painless for the rat- not a way that is easy on the conscience of the keeper. Many people like euthanasias that sort of remove them from the deed or that 'look' painless but are not.

Answer 5

Does your pet store have the frozen rats packaged in bags of 20? My ball python recently moved up to rats, and our local PetCo has the ones packaged together. I only buy one or two at a time, but I get to choose which ones I buy.

Feeding "live" mice or rats, even if you incapacitate (kill) them first, can actually be harmful to your snake because of the parasites they can carry. With frozen ones, if there were any parasites, the flash-freeze killed them.

Answer 6

An alternative to gassing would be to simply freeze them. That's what we do when our only local pet store runs out of prekilled. Just put one in a disposable tupperware-type container, seal it, and put it in the freezer for about a half hour. It sounds awful, but it's just as humane as gassing them and they die pretty quickly.

Oh, and you probably know this, but I just read someone's answer about putting them in the microwave and wanted to point out that you should NEVER feed a snake a freshly-nuked prey item, whether the microwave was used to kill it or just defrost/warm frozen prey. Microwaving does not heat evenly and can cause hot spots that can severely burn your snake after it eats the prey.

Answer 7

actually, go to the party store and buy a small helium tank, easier to find and keep that frozen C02 (dry ice) for blowing up party baloons, put the prey item in a margerine tubwith a hole cut in the top and one off center in the bottom, have 2 pieces of tape stuck beside the holes and ready to smooth down, then run the gas about 4-5 seconds, and push the tape down.
the fastest easiest way is the microwave, takes about 10 seconds for a rat, 20 for a full grown rabbit. the microwaves pass through the skull and bounce around in there frying the autonomic centers and killing fast, another method is just grabbing the rat by the tail (i hate this one) and whacking its head to stun it. or you can take a lamp cord and strip the ends and touch them together on the rats head. this one works faster than the microwave, but is risky for you
i agree with jester, let someone else do the deed, and just buy them from the site he showed you, you can get them in bulk from there. people in my herp club use the above methods, not myself.

Answer 8

why would you do that to a rat how would you like it if some one Di that to you huh answer back OK

Answer 9

well you can feed them pre-froven mice at the petstore .

Answer 10

disgusting those poor rats.