I don't see a reason to ever use fish as a source of food or scent for hogs. From my experience with literally hundreds of hatchling hogs I produced over the last 5 seasons, I have never had to resort to using fish to feed or scent. And when I do scent {tree frog} it only goes on for 2 or 3 feedings and they are on to unscented. In my opinion, fish has no use when it comes to hognose snakes.

And yet I've found a reason to use fish as a scenting method, because I don't have easy access to tree frogs or anything else frog or toad related.

My only problem with what most people use in regards to scenting is the canned stuff which is usually loaded with preservatives and oils and many other things that are not good for us humans and therefore cannot be all that good for the snakes either. This is why I use fresh salmon as a means of scenting and it's worked when all else has failed trying with various pinky methods. All I do is take a very thin sliver of fresh salmon and put it on top of the pinky and usually they attack it.

The key here is to not let our own personal opinions/biases get in the way of what works when all else fails. It doesn't matter if you, Gregg, don't use fish as a means to get your stubborn snakes eating; what does matter is that this method does in fact work for a lot of people, including myself. And instead of arguing about the merits of whether to use this method or not based on our own preferences/prejudices, we should instead try to understand why it works. Then perhaps we can have a better understanding of triggering eating responses in hognose, especially the stubborn ones!

And BTW, I had to use fresh salmon scented pinkies for one of my Pink Anacondas when all else failed. His brother took to f/t pinkies right away but this bugger, he refused everything until that magic moment when I offered him a salmon scented pinky, he went nuts. It took about 8 scented feedings until I was able to ween him off of it and onto unscented.
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Troy Rexroth
Rextiles

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