Hognose Snake

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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On my lunch break yesterday I was riding my bike around and saw a shop called the “Subterrarian Jungle Shop,” so I stopped in and found out it was a pet shop that specializes in reptiles and amphibians. I walked from tank to tank, enamoured by all these weird chameleons (their eyes move independently and their feet work backwards), delicate geckos, huge pythons, flourescent dart frogs, Russian tortoises, and then I bought a baby hognose snake. I’ve always wanted one of these and I’m telling you, there is such a thing as a cute snake. Hognose snakes are kind of chubby and they are velvety smooth and have little turned-up noses. In the wild if you surprise one, it will roll over on its back and play dead. If you turn it right side up, it will flip over again to prove it’s dead.

My snake is only about 8 inches long. After I bought it, I asked a little more about the species and found out that it is a rear-fanged venomous snake, which I never knew. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, as long as you aren’t a toad, because it would really have to chew on some part of you (like the web between your thumb and index finger) to invenomate any kind of bite. Apparently toads will puff up as a defense mechanism, and the venom in the snake’s fangs just pops em like a balloon. I have to admit that, as much as I like toads too, I would like to see this sometime. The pet store guy told me the snake would also eat newborn pinky mice, which they sell, too. But then I looked into it further…

Apparently in the wild, hognose snames almost exclusively eat toads. These are not always easy for the snake owner to find, especially in the wintertime, so you have to persuade captive hognose snakes to switch over to eating pinky mice. (I had a friend once who kept snakes that only ate lizards - LIVE lizards - and I used to go with him when he’d hunt lizards for his snakes. To while away his time in Vietnam during the war, he learned to be an incredibly accurate rubber band shooter. So we’d hike up in the foothills of the Sandia mountains at dusk and he would stun fence lizards and whiptail lizards* {see footnote below} with rubber bands, and then we’d take them home to feed his snakes.)

Back to my research about feeding hognose snakes. Some of them are apparently finicky about making the switch from toads to mice, so - needless to say - snake aficionados go to great lengths to get them to eat what is more readily available. You can buy baby mice in most pet stores. It helps - according to the literature - to dangle a pink mouse in front of the snake or even to simulate it jumping like a toad. Still, some snakes are not impressed. Next, the experts say it might help to cut open the belly of a toad and squish the mouse around in its entrails in order to capture its scent, and then offer this new fragrant tidbit to the spoiled snake. Still not interested? There are more suggestions. “Some snakes will accept split brain pinkies” says one site. Huh? Read further to find a description of how you bean this baby mouse to death, split open its head and squeeze some of the cream out in order to tempt the snake to eat. Better yet, keep a tupperware container in your fridge of minced up toads and use it like a pate to dip a split oozing brain newborn mouse. Then make this stinky gruesome thing do a little hoppy dance in front of the snake and maybe you’ll be lucky enough to elicit some interest in eating. What have I gotten myself into? We’ll find out on Saturday when I bring home a mouse for the snake. I hope it eats, because I’m kind of attached to this snake, but I’m not about to go braining and creaming mice and dipping them into toad guts, then making them dance. I’ve got some pride and I’m NOT a total snake nerd.

*whiptails lizards - When I was about 18 years old, I was standing in a field drinking a beer in New Mexico and saw a lizard dart by. Instinctively, I set my beer bottle down and diverted the lizard into the bottle. Took it home and brought out my Southwestern Reptiles book to try to identify it. Found out that that this was a New Mexico Whiptail Lizard, nemodophorous neomexicanus. They are almost all females in the species that don’t require males to breed, because they reproduce via parthenogenesis. (They make a few males every few generations, presumably to fix their washing machines and to explain who’s ahead in the cricket game.)

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Sounds like an awful lot of mouse torture to make a snake eat… just sayin’ is all.

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Yes, feeding a finicky snake can be a messy buiseness. I just hope you don’t have to resort to force feeding the bugger. I bought my Mexican Red Tail Boa from a reptile breeder’s expo in Daytona, and as it turns out, he was a very sick snake with no appetite at all. I tried force feeding him, cutting open a dead mouses’s head, dangling the pinkie around to make him look more animated…if I hadn’t just woke up at this stagnant hour of 2:44pm I’m sure I could think of more heinous example of what I put him through. Case in point: I’ve been there. Eventually I took him to the vet, they found he had mites, gave him a shot, and all has been well since.

Back to your cute li’l Hognose. Seeing as how this is a 8 inch long, captive bred snake, shouldn’t it already be living off a diet of pinky mice? You’re not assuming you have to condition him onto a diet of pinky mice without first checking to see if he’s already eating them, are you? I don’t imagine the pet shop has been taking weekly treks to the outside to hunts toads, and if they’ve been feeding them toads they’ve ordered, perhaps you could do the same. I’d definately ask them how they’ve been keeping care of him right up untill your purchase. Some pet shops will sell you a wild animal that’s much less likely to make a good healthy pet than one that’s been captive bred.

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Poor Kermit.

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Well, maybe. It’s true that they are opisthoglyphous, but it’s unclear whether they actually have any venom. They don’t appear to have any venom sacs, and the fangs don’t have any venom grooves. However, there have been cases of venom-like reactions to the bite of a hognose. It sort of remains unclear whether these effects are the result of envenomation or of a reaction to bacteria or other critters that may live in the snake’s mouth. In any case, hognoses are usually considered “functionally nonvenomous” - basically, it’s damn near impossible to make them bite you, and even if they did, it’s very doubtful you’d have anything other than the typical free-bleeding pinprick bite of a normal colubrid snake.

Oh, and they also exhibit another defensive mechanism, leading to their folk nickname, the “puff adder.” Upon first contact, they will often rear up aggressively and flatten out their necks, cobra-like, while puffing their bodies up to look bigger than they really are. If this fails, they’ll put on the death-show. Their feigning death is usually very convincing, and may also consist of bleeding from the eyes, mouth, and cloaca, ejection of feces, regurgitation, twitching, and finally, stillness. But if you turn 'em back right, they’ll flop back over into the feigned-death position. It’s a spectacular (and amusing) show.

And yes, I’m aware that there is a real viperid snake in Southern Africa that is known as the “puff adder.” It is quite deadly (possibly the deadliest snake in Africa in terms of numbers of bites and fatalities) and there is very little about it that is amusing. It’s a pretty massive, muscular beast, and it bites to kill.

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Yes, this snake was captive bred and is not a hatchling, so I’m fairly certain it’s accustomed to a diet of mice. I mostly wanted to share all the stuff I read! It’s a Western hognose, which is also apparently more flexible, diet-wise, than the Eastern variety.

:::wondering if I could use this technique to get out of the next HRRC work meeting:::

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Oooh, hognoses are fun. A construction crew brought one in to the nature center where I used to volunteer, but we decided not to keep it due to the difficulty of catching toads (it was a southern hognose that had apparently strayed a bit north of its standard geographical range).

Make sure you give it enough substrate to burrow in, since they do like to dig.

Their feigned-death display is quite impressive, although also amusing as Ogre noted.
Have fun with it!

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Yes, s/he does love to dig. Spends half the day in a burrow with just that little upturned nose showing. Awww!!

I found one on a trail once and got to see the play-dead game. No cobra trick, though.