While I’ve never considered hot dogs to be the perfect food, critters seem to hold a different opinion. I’ve seen the gluttony and critter wars to prove the validity of their perspective.
As a kid, I found that using pieces of hot dogs for bait at freshwater spots brought quick bites from bluegill, crappie, catfish and carp.
In the ocean, the same bait earned me thousands of bites from a wide variety of tasty fish, making the task of catching dinner for the family much easier.
Truth is a piece of hot dog doesn’t stay on the hook very well and fish can readily steal it off the hook. Once a fish steals the bait from the hook, they all swarm to steal bits from one another. Their justice system looks much different than ours.
The voracity of critters when it comes to hot dogs can be quite a source of amusement and entertainment. For example, I vividly recall being a little kid hanging out with my Dad while he fished a jetty formed from large granite boulders.
All manner of shelled critters called those big jetty boulders home. That included mussels, barnacles and small rock crabs. I found it great fun to use little slices of hot dogs to draw the rock crabs out of hiding.
Once in the open, on a flat part of a rock, they would readily devour the little slices of soft meat. After some time, I discovered that I could draw out a few rock crabs from the other side of the rock.
It didn’t take long before I figured out that by putting a few little slices of hot dogs between the two groups of rock crabs, I could get them into combat mode as they tried stealing or prying away the meaty pieces from the other little crab army.
In fresh water, I learned that crawdads behave similarly. This gave me plenty to do while my Dad fished and I wanted to play.
After a half-day of fishing a jetty or a pier, and with some good dinner fish in Dad’s gunny sack, we’d start back and almost always stop somewhere for lunch.
When asked what I wanted for lunch, I answered, “Anything but hot dogs!”
That was the genesis of my lifelong rule of rarely eating anything I use for bait. That kept me from eating some really good foods like calamari (squid), sardines and anchovies.
I’m thinking the real reason for that rule was if I put hot dogs inside of me, those warring critters would know it and attack me to get at the hot dogs inside. I guess ya gotta be a kid to understand that logic.