Sometimes I feel like I'm cursed when it comes to feeding...

[Jhill001]

....and then the corns and my biggest hognose female reminds me that I'm not completely cursed as they inhale their food without hesitation. It's frustrating though having various species not want to eat for weeks or months at a time. I know hognoses are notorious for going off food but you can't help but feel like it's you when new arrivals won't eat even a few weeks after getting settled.

All temps are spot on, humidity is within the acceptable range and they are being fed appropriately sized meals. It's a weekly round of roulette with who will eat and who won't. I plan to brumate the majority of the hogs even though I'm only breeding a single pair. Fingers crossed that will get them back on track. Now I just need the burm to stop being difficult.


/anxiety fueled rant.

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk

My trick with fussy feeders has always been to just gradually get worse as a keeper, in terms of feeding at least lol.

Note: this is assuming you have a healthy snake, with dialed in temps, etc. Always check to make sure there are enough hides in the case that it may be a security issue. Not a note for the OP but for any inexperienced keepers who might be reading.

I'm not going to waste tons of money on snakes that don't eat, if they don't want to eat every 2 weeks, well they'll get moved to every 3 weeks, even up to a month if necessary. I don't know why this seems to work, I'm thinking it's because primarily related to the stress of attempted feedings more than hunger, and assuming there is little to no weight loss everything should be fine. If you do something like 3 weeks and the snake is overweight you could expect a smidge of weightloss that would just be permanent but the snake wouldn't lose much more. If you are keeping your snakes in a rack system you can't do this but if they are in individual enclosures you could always try bumping up the heat a few degrees or bumping it down a few degrees just to see if that does the trick. Once the snake takes two meals in a row on the starve em out schedule you can try and tighten it back up to your collection's standard feeding schedule.