I have to agree with this. I have never seen a T break a fang due to feeding too soon after a molt. I have had adults that did not eat for a month or more and small s'lings that ate within 24 hours. I think there may be a key to this problem in the last sentence. We work diligently to keep all our Ts alive; bad molts, lost bodyparts, etc. It seems reasonable that in the wild there is a lot more natural selection going on and Ts with genetic defects are soon weeded out.Code Monkey said:My take is that, with the rare exception like Gary experienced, the only thing that happens from feeding a T before they are fully hardened is you get uneaten prey. It's one of those things, like moulting in the first place, that the owner doesn't actually need to put any thought into, the T will handle things just fine on its own, refusing to eat until after it's ready. I've never once seen an adult take prey until multiple days have passed after its moult; I'd go so far as to say, that although I respect Gary's skills and take on things very much, that he's attributing the broken fangs incorrectly to being fed too soon after a moult and that the fangs failed for an entirely different reason.
Any T too dumb to try and use its fangs before they were hard enough failed the trade off game of life and removed itself from the gene pool.
My own approach is to feed only appropriately sized prey when I think the T is ready to eat again. Before a molt I use the same size rule. My experience is that a T can handle an appropriately sized prey item either by killing and leaving it or closing its burrow.