If you worked at a zoo or alligator farm, and it was your job to feed the 'gators, crocodiles, or Komodo Dragons (giant flesh-eating monitor lizards) -- what animal would you feel most comfortable feeding it? (see details)

You’d feed them animals already butchered. Thaw out frozen chicken, fish, hot dogs, etc. Fortunately, they’re reptiles and need a lot fewer calories than mammals of comparable mass. I wonder if Purina has a Gator Chow?

From what I’ve read, that’s pretty much how they do it (in reality).

You certainly wouldn’t feed them what they might catch in the wild. The zoo would be bankrupt in weeks from the sheer expense.

Zoos feed them dead animals, but for the sake of this question, I’d feed them chickens because they’re compact. They could chomp them in one bite rather than having to deal with legs flailing and parts of the animal being outside the jaws. It’s less torturous for the animal being eaten. ewwwwwww

Ida know – I have a sadistic streak sometimes which most of the humane jellies on this sight will find baneful.

Remember the chimpanzee Festus? Festus (October 21, 1995 – February 16, 2009) was a male common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) who, in February 2009, mauled a friend of his owner in Stamford, Connecticut, blinding her, severing several body parts and lacerating her face. His owner’s friend lost her face, and had to have a new face surgically attached, but she still lost fingers and was forever blinded

Naughty Festus. What to do with Festus the chimp? Well, maybe lets see how he does facing real predators. Primates are terrified of reptiles and snakes. A Komodo dragon is kind of like a huge gator, with sixty razor-sharp teeth and a flickering snakelike tongue.

Feed Festus to the giant Komodo.

^^^ And sell tickets.

The chimp is almost certainly too valuable to simply be fed to a crocodile. I wonder what a lab pays for it’s chimps. I bet you’d be shocked.

Monkeys and lesser apes range from a couple of thousand up to about $14,000 I think.

Chimps and Gorillas and great apes can cost around $30,000 to $40,000—only well-funded labs can afford them, then subject them to horrors beyond anything they would ever encounter in the wild. And that’s saying a lot, because simians and their hierarchies are absolutely horrible to each other and their lower, peripheral, or outcast members.

As for Festus the Chimp, I could be wrong but I believe he was humanely euthanized shortly after his outraged jealousy attack that his female owner actually had a female friend.

Too expensive? Hell, I’d feed him to the ‘mugger’ crocks that attack en masse.

People who argue that BLM is unamerican?

I had a friend who used to have a reptile zoo. Some reptiles simply will not eat dead animals. Their pery needs to be alive and moving or they must be force fed. They always fed their pythons live rabbits.

So I guess in answer to your question, I would choose rabbits.

@Lightlyseared Too American, IMHO but what does that have to do with the Question?

(FYI though we’re getting WAYYYY off topic—but that’s okay as I am the original poster)—BLM is what I would call a Pan African movement. Marxist, perhaps, but not out of the scope of being American.

Why did you bring THAT up?

@snowberry When I was in fifth grade, somebody brought a snake and my teacher fed it some of the burgeoning surplus mice from the classroom Habitrail mouse city.

I don’t know if there were any complaints, and maybe it was indeed inappropriate. But no one would get away with that today!

@Yellowdog That’s one reason why a lot of folks home school and/or choose to live in the country. The children learn from an early age what the real world really is like. Carnivores must eat meat, and in the wild they eat live animals.

The people I mentioned above invited us over one evening for a barbeque and to watch the snakes eat. (They were an unusual family, and yes, they homeschooled, as did we.)

Well, if it occurs in nature, there is nothing inhumane about it.

I wouldn’t want to feed domestic animals (dogs, cats, animals who live with humans) to wild prey. But animals to animals that naturally live this way in the wild, know no other way of life, and don’t bond with us and trust us—I have no problem with it whatsover.

Chickens.