as i have said all along, i can't stand it when when i foul hook a fish, it takes forever to wrassle the thing in to get my parts back, of course i know "how to" floss but to me its a waste of time, the longer leader it is to increase fish hooked in the mouth after i have felt the same "bite sensation" i get when drifting eggs, i've tried the shorter leaders at blue creek & barrier without too much luck, so until some one gets an underwater camera we are left to speculate on whether its a bullseye! right into a swimming fishes' open mouth or the fish chewed on it...

i can see where if the line went sideways across & into the fishes open mouth & you pulled & the hook gets stuck outside his mouth (but close enough to so call "call it legal") then maybe the dentist theory works but, to say you can consistently drift a corkie INTO the open mouth of a swimming fish is kinda far fetched for me...

on smaller rivers i use 18" to 3' leaders w/eggs or sand shrimp, haven't found the need to go much longer & longer leaders get stuck on the bottom too much...

the only "foul" hooked fish i ever KEPT in my life was the last silver we needed that day in rough water out of westport several years ago, the trailing hook "hooked" barely imbedded behind the bottom part of the gill plate (fell out when the fish was rolling in the net) at some point during the bite or the fight, the front hook when I saw it last, was right by but not stuck in his mouth, i'm thinking it was possibly stuck in there at one point maybe, being barbless it might have fell out once the trailing hook stuck, who knows, in the end i decided that the fish was trying to bite my herring & the wind was getting even worse, so i kept it....

as to the snagger argument, thats been on this been on BB a million times & better left to others...