Does anyone else do this?

You can get chicken hearts at the grocery super cheap, as in 80 cents per pound, and they have way more fat than the average rat or mouse. my bulls, pines, and indigo love them.

can they fully replace rodents? doesn't seem like they would have the same nutrients found in bone and such.

I can see the benefits of that if you need to bulk up a skinny one, or one that is sick. But I am wondering whether or not that would be good long term?? I am not bashing or anything, because I honestly don't know...and I am sure my chameleons wouldn't care for them too much

I still feed them mice and rats, I just supplement with the hearts. The mice I have been getting from Big Cheese Rodent Factory are skin and bones, I am going to try their small rats out but if they are the same way I am going to buy elsewhere.

More fat is NOT a good thing. Obesity is an epidemic in captive snakes, and their metabolism is too slow to use ingested fat directly. It just gets STORED as fat. In exchange for faster weight gain (not necessarily true HEALTHY grow) and visual, but unnecessary, growth; you are acceptable the high probability of a greatly reduced life span for your pets. It may be cheaper, but it isn't as healthy. If it makes up even a small, but significant, portion of their diet, you are not doing anything good for the overall health of the snake.

I wish I could buy mice that were truly skinny. It would be more realistic in terms of what they feed on naturally in the wild. However, i have spent in excess of $10,000 with Big Cheese over the past few years, and I have never got a package of mice that are "skin and bones."
KJ

http://www.nal.usda.gov/awic/zoo/Who...nal02May29.pdf
Sorry about it being a pdf file, but it is full of great information on the nutritional values of various prey animals.
I had mulled over the idea of feeding chicken hearts to my snakes, mainly to skirt the high price of buying mice, but decided instead to raise my own mice. I can feed my mice a really good diet and know that my snakes are benefiting from this. All one needs is a separate room to put the mouse colony in, as they are rather stinky!

Cant see how this would help at all. Snakes get a lot more of what they need from a whole prey time. Bones, fir, and skin all help with calcium and other needed nutrients they wont get from feeding something like this....

I have seen some pretty fat mice and especially rats in the wild, in fact, most rodents are pretty plump except for mice and shrews, whose metabolism and general activity level are much higher. I feed them maybe one heart each every 4 days plus a mouse every other day (none of them are fully grown). Is this too much for snakes born in 2006?

It sounds like you are feeding them every 2 days (i.e., "a mouse every other day") and a heart every 4 days.....meaning they get a mouse and a heart every 4 days. If that is right, you are almost definitely overfeeding them....by a BUNCH. Even a MOUSE every other day is 2-3 times what you should be feeding them unless they are big snakes getting small mice (relatively speaking, of course)......so YES, you are likely overfeeding them by a good bit.

This is too much even if one is thin and another kinda undersized? I am just now getting into snakes since I was a kid, so I am learning a lot. Thanks for all the replies btw.

I have a 6' Indigo male, a 6' fem bull that is really big circumference wise, a 4' male bull, and a 4.5ft Northern Pine female. the two smaller snakes get mice, and they are usually pretty scrawny. the two big ones get small rats and only once every 4 days. but my Pine seems pretty thin, I wanted to get her a little bigger. she hasn't been eating very well because I have been moving around so much and leaving her with people when I am away. I am settled now tho, and she is coming around.

The male bull is pretty small but isn't thin. he is just so much smaller than the female bull from the same birth date (they have a parent in common but aren't siblings) so I have been feeding him more too. All of these snakes are from 2006 except the Indigo which is a 2005.