Well, that's yet another human food item to add to the list of possible scenting items.

One of the other odd things I read mentioned a while back I believe on a different forum was that someone was using Kentucky Fried Chicken skin to rub on the pinkies and his previously non-eating snakes went berserk for it.

Personally, I would only considering using something processed like that as a totally last resort if even force feeding wasn't working out which in my eyes would be a kind of end of the road ordeal anyways.

What intrigues me though is why you believe that using processed foods such as cooked sausage juice would "be (a) lot healthier and safer than frog or some other type of WC scent". What makes you ultimately draw this conclusion? Surely mother nature has provided these animals with the right tools and design to eat frogs and toads in the wild anyways as part of their normal diet, not KFC chicken grease or cooked sausage juice. While it might entice them to eat, and that's typically a good thing, I question whether all that grease and other ingredients, something they would never encounter in the wild, would be detrimental to their health over the long run or even perhaps the short haul.

Sure, I understand that this method might only be used a limited number of times just to get them to eat. But I might also believe that feeding a baby snake might be somewhat comparable to that of a baby human child. We don't start of feeding our children the majority of the items we consume as their body's cannot properly digest these items. I would kind of make the assumption that this might also be true of hatchlings as the items at their disposal typically have to be of the same size that they can handle which would probably result in them eating mainly items that differ significantly than those of adults such as insects.

Now there's been many debates on the health factors on feeding pinky mice to certain species of baby snakes anyways, especially hognose which do not typically feed on pinkies, but that's a debate that most of us are well aware of and one I don't wish to divert this conversation towards.

But again, I have to wonder about the effects of ingested processed and sometimes greasy foods in relation to the overall health of hatchling reptiles. I welcome all constructive thoughts on this matter.


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Troy Rexroth
Rextiles

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