This is certainly a sensitive subject for me personally, as some of the forum longtimeers will know from my many "discussions" about amphibian feeders. I do think it is cruel to use live feeders (of course this is limited to vertebrates), and I am currently maintaining an inventory of 180 reptiles and amphibians without using any live feeders including not sacrificing a single amphibian to switch Easterns over to mice (although I rarely need to do this because I refuse wild caught adults and the ones I do have are thriving for more than 10 years on an exclusive mouse diet). If it was not unnecessary I would not have a problem with it.



One problem is that the feeder does not get a humane death, instead it has to endure being captured, transported, pursued by the snake, captured again and swallowed alive (imagine how those fangs feel!). Unfortunately there are not too many options for a humane death for a feeder that will not be contaminated with chemicals. Most people are not willing to go the extra mile to euthanize a feeder with CO2 gas (and I'm not even sure of its effectiveness on amphibians).



My priorities are simple, wild animals before captive animals. I thoroughly disagree with removing animals from the wild just to feed a captive snake that in all likely this will have absolutely no benefit to any wild animal directly. I have made the case over a dozen times on this forum about how most people's tendencies actually select for smaller toads and ultimately an amphibian population that is less fit. If it were absolutely necessary to use a toad or an anole, ideally you would use one that is non-native such as the Brown anoles suggested by bachman. And again, I have been made the case for using a live toad as a set a source for hognoses. Toads are one of the easiest captive amphibians to maintain, and one can be kept quite comfortably in a 10 gallon and be used as a fresh source for scenting. My ulterior motive for this method is to create awareness for amphibians and their decline since one of the benefits of keeping wild animals as pets is to make the owner more sympathetic to their problems in the wild since they will relate their captive animals to wild ones.



This post certainly should answer your question for you, but give you a direction of where to go from here. I can assure you, a hognoses will eventually take a mouse before it ultimately starves to death. It has never been reported on this forum that a healthy hognose would not accept mice as food, but would accept all others, and starved because it simply would not accept a mouse as a food item. Find your self a toad, do some research on its captive husbandry, and I'm sure you'll barely have to use it for scenting once you get the hognose going!
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...the oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it."

Aldo Leopold (1938)



"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."

Calvin and Hobbes (Scientific Progress Goes 'Boink', 1991)

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