What happens if a baby hognose snake bites a paper towel?

When I was visiting my friend and asking about his hognose snakes, which are about five months old now, he got one of them out to show me how voracious these baby snakes are. Now that they're fully in the routine of eating well, he was opening the container and showing me how they're basically ready to eat every time he gets them out. They're posturing as though they're going to strike, and anything in their way they're interpreting as a meal.

He was holding a paper towel above the container, and this baby snake struck the paper towel and tried to eat it as though it were a mouse. He wanted to get the paper towel out of the snake's mouth without just pulling on it, because he didn't want the snake to rip off pieces and end up swallowing it.

To do that, he used a q-tip soaked in vinegar and pushed it near the corners of the snake's mouth. His goal was that a really smelly or repulsive scent or taste would make the snake want to give up on the item and not try to eat it. That's how he got his snake to let go in the past when it bit his hand.

He just slowly kept dipping the q-tip into the vinegar and then back onto the paper towel, and eventually the snake let go and didn’t consume it. It took several minutes, but he was patient, not trying to pull it out of the snake’s mouth, just using the disgusting taste of vinegar to get the snake to abandon the perceived meal.

It was interesting to watch the way the snake was trying to envenomate the paper towel. I could see it moving its jaw side to side as if it was trying to make its jaw bigger to accommodate the whole paper towel. It was trying to eat that entire thing, ratcheting it in farther, and it just makes it seem like snakes will take on something way bigger than they can handle.

It’s amazing what they can actually swallow because their anatomy will expand to accommodate a meal that’s bigger than their head. So if your snake tries to eat something that it shouldn’t, don’t panic. See if you can find something that’s safe but repulsive to help them let go of the item.