I've always been fascinated by snakes. Few critters point up the true majesty and glory of natural evolution like a snake. With no arms and no legs, they manage to motivate in a weird, but highly effective manner. Prey is killed via either constriction or poisoning. Their digestive process is a miracle in itself. You must remember that when food is swallowed whole, the digestive process must have intricacies unimagined when compared to critters who eat "civilized" processed foods. Snakes have a crude pattern of emotions. I've seen guilt, contentment, lust, anger and fright in the snakes I have owned. I always felt that snakes got a bum rap in the Bible when the writers cast the serpent as the bad guy in the Adam and Eve saga. As creatures of nature, they represent the pure, perfect genius of natural evolution.
In the late seventies while living in Florida, I owned two snakes, one a small pink Boa female named "Puffy", and a 14-foot male Burmese python I had named "Tyrone" after a running back I had seen in the NFL. "Puffy", at three-feet long, was pretty boring. Once she got out of her cage and crawled up into the wall and my girlfriend had to call the sheetrock guys to tear out a section of wall to remove her. I only had "Puffy" for about 6 months. "Tyrone" was a different story. With "Tyrone", I learned that lots of people get totally freaked out at the sight of a 14-foot snake, especially a Burmese python. The Burmese has a dark, slithery, jungle-like essence which engenders an intense promodial fear in most people, especially those who believe in the Holy Bible. When I bought "Tyrone", the guy at the pet shop said he was a good eater and shedder, had regular bowel movements and was very gentle because the last four generations of his ancesty had all been bred and raised in captivity.
So I put "Tyrone" in a 50-gallon aquarium in the garage and he and I got along handsomely. I always fed him once a week. I would feed him a baby chicken as an appetizer, then wait about an hour for digestion to begin then feed him a two-pound rabbit as the main course. His bowel movements were like clockwork. Sometimes, he wouldn't shed cleanly and I would add a couple of tablespoons of baby oil to his bathwater and the remaining scales would slip right off. On Sundays, I would take him out of the cage for exercise in the grassy knoll near the condo when me and my girlfriend lived. Naturally, when I was exercising him, a crowd--especially children--would gather to gawk. One Sunday, a Jewish kid who lived in the same condo complex, asked me if "Tyrone" was a Jewish snake. Once when my girlfriend had her upper-crust Palm Beach ladies over for tea and crumpets, "Tyrone" got out of his cage and slithered into the midst of the festivities. Although "Tyrone" meant absolutely no harm, the Palm Beach ladies knocked the sliding glass door off its rollers making their escape to the patio. My girlfriend--who was livid over the incident--said I had to choose between her or "Tyrone".
Three months later, I moved out and headed to California. Naturally, "Tyrone", the cage and reptile-keeping paraphernalia went with me in the U-haul truck. For the trip, I had installed "Tyrone" in a cardboard box in the seat beside me. When I arrived at the toll booth at the end of the Florida turnpike at Wildwood, the woman took my ticket to calculate the toll. When she turned back to me and said: "That'll be $12.60...", she saw "Tyrone" who had crawled out of his box and was sticking his head out the window, flashing his tongue at her. Instantly, the toll woman jerked back her hand and screamed in fright. I calmly handed over the $12.60. The woman, her face white with fear and her eyes as big as saucers, started shouting: "What kind of nut are you?!! Get that thing out of here!!" I took my receipt and drove away. He had a great bowel movement in Sierra Blanca, Texas and I stopped to exercise him at a truck stop near Blythe, California where a bearded trucker, wearing a "Cat" cap and chewing tobacco, observed: "One of these days, that critter is going to twine itself around you and have you for dinner."
In Santa Monica, I met up with my English friend who had just divorced his wife. He had an arctic house rabbit called "Beau" and explained that I couldn't keep "Tyrone" in the house because the rabbit would be in mortal danger. I agreed and installed my Burmese in my friend's garage. But it was cold and damp in the garage and I knew "Tyrone" was not going to be happy. I placed a heat lamp in the cage to warm him up. It helped but I knew he still wasn't happy. Four days after I arrived, I met this long-legged brunette next door and I started spending time with her rather than "Tyrone". For three days, I failed to check on him. On the fourth day, I went to feed him and he had escaped. I looked high, low and in-between at my friend's house, but failed to find him. I called the local SPCA people over and over and questioned neighbors, but there was neither hide nor hair of "Tyrone". I never knew his fate. I was heart-broken.
In late March of 2003, I was living near Atlanta and spending a lot of time with my 12-year-old grandson Christopher. I told him about "Puffy" and "Tyrone" and how I loved snakes and what beautiful creatures they were. From that point on, he began to push into buying another snake. I explained over and over that the proper care of a snake required lots of time, patience and discipline. He said he didn't care, he wanted a snake.
The following June, my grandson and I began checking out local pet shops. We looked at Columbian red-tails, Brazilian tree snakes, some black Boas, several ratsnakes and several California kingsnakes. We finally ended up at a pet store near Decatur, Georgia. There, in the back of the store, away from all the other critters, we found a three-foot Burmese python with a "For Sale" sign on the cage. Over the past four months, the critter had been marked down from $125 to $80. When I showed an interest in the snake, the kid said: "Now you understand that the Burmese is very aggressive, especially those that have been taken directly from the wild."
This kid explained that this snake had been taken directly from the jungles of Northern Thailand about two months earlier and, as a result, was more aggressive than those whose parents were bred and raised in capitivity.
"No problem," I said. "I mastered a 14-footer many years ago, so I shouldn't have an problems with a three-footer."
"Ok," the kid said, "I'll let you have him for $75."
So, I bought the snake, a cage, a watering bowl, a heat lamp and substrate (a finely-crushed walnut shell material for the snake to nestle in) and left the store.
"Let's call him "Slick", my grandson said as we drove from the pet shop back to my house.
"No, let's name him Oswald and Chester or Homer...some weird human name."
"Grandaddy," he objected, "You don't give animals human names. You have to give him a descriptive name, something that describes him like "Slick".
"But he's not slick," I replied. "That's a misconception people have about snakes. His skin is an dry as yours or mine".
"I want to call him 'Slick', grandaddy," my grandson pressed.
"Ok," I replied, not wanting to argue, "Slick it is...."
Once we had the cage set up back at my house, I took the snake out of the cloth bag so my grandson and I could get acquainted. As I held the snake in my hands, my grandson was stroking the snake's head and saying: "Hey, little snakie, snakie... good, good snakie"
Suddenly, the snake lunged out and bit my grandson on the nose. My grandson, whose nose was bleeding, started crying hysterically. I put the snake in the cage and went to my grandson. I wiped the blood off his nose and dried his tears and consoled him as best I could.
My first instinct was to kill the snake, then and there. I had visions of grabbing the snake and taking it outside and slamming it against the picket fence in the backyard until it was dead. But I tried to control myself. I had bought the critter so me and my grandson would have something to do together, so I relented from my murderous visions. Finally, I told myself the snake was probably under severe stress from being moved to new surroundings, so I decided to let it live. I felt it might be a challenge to try to "civilize" my new pet. How wrong I was! At first, I tried to teach him some manners with the "gentle" treatment. When I would open the cage, I would speak in quiet, soothing, dulcet tones to let him know I was present. Then, I would softly caress his back and tail, continue to speak in soft tones until finally, and ever so gently, lift him out of the cage. After the first week, it was working like a charm. I thought I had it down. I thought "Hey! He's learning some manners."
So at the end of the first week, I proceeded to give him his first bath.
As before, I quietly slide open the cage door and speaking ever so gently, I started to stroke his back. About the time I started to grasp his body to lift him out, he suddenly lashed out and bit my hand. Instantly, I withdrew my bloody hand and wiped it off. "You little SOB!", I said to myself. "You were just waiting for me!" Moments later, I tried the same ploy again and withdrew a bloody hand a second time.
Several days later, I decided that it was futile to try to "gentle" the snake into civility, so I tried a new tactic. This time, before I opened the cage door, I started shouting:"You little SOB! I'm going to kill you! You're going to be breakfast for the chicken hawks!" Then I started beating my fist on the side of the cage and the whole stucture started to shake. Since there was nowhere to run inside the cage, he instantly froze with fright. I placed a glove on my hand and reached inside, saying nothing. When he sensed my hand coming into the cage, he went into a penitent position. When a snake feels guilt, he will coil and put his head deep inside the coil. This body position lets the onlooker know that the snake is at their mercy. It is the opposite from the strike position. He was gentle as a lamb when I placed him in the warm bath water. He had a good bowel movement and I cleaned his eyes and small bits of scales from the previous shedding. "Slick" got his first bath successfully and everything was hunky-dory.
Two weeks later, when he was due for a second bath, I went through the same drill. I froze him into fright by yelling and beating on the cage. He went into penitent mode, I lifted him out and placed him into the bath water. Then I took the snake and the plastic tub containing the bath water out on the patio. As I reached my hand in to begin the bath, he struck at me. I jerked my hand back and, as I did, he crawled out of the plastic tub and tried to make as escape across the backyard. Sensing the wide open spaces, he must have thought he was back in the jungles of Northern Thailand. Instantly, I was on my feet after him. I grabbed his tail and held him out at arms length like the snake handlers on TV. Boy was he mad!! As I held him out from my body, he kept lunging toward me trying to bite me and spitting a gray, thick liquid at me. But he was helpless. Finally, after the anger had dissipated, he calmed down and I returned him to his bath and finished it without incident.
As mentioned earlier, the digestive process of the snake is truly a miracle. When a snake ingests prey, the whole rat is swallowed, hook line and sinker. There is no cutting up of the meat, breaking off a leg from the shoulder or adding salt and pepper. The rat's bones, hair and tissue is all ingested in one fell swoop. As a result, his poop was made up of three balls. One is a black, gelatinous ball which is the digestive aftermath of the rat's tissue. The second ball is a tiny spheroid of pure white calcium. This is what the snake's digestive tract makes of the rat's bones. The third ball is a hair ball. Apparently, the snake's digestive apparatus cannot digest the rat's hair so it is rolled into a neat little ball of unprocessed hair and excreted. So much for the miracle of a snake's digestion.
The biggest fight me and "Slick" had occured about six months into the relationship. One Sunday morning, I had gone to the pet shop, bought a live rat and returned home to feed him. The moment I opened the cage door to throw in the rodent, he lunged at me, grabbed the side of my hand and began to wrap his body around my hand and arm in a constricting motion. This time I was the one that flew into a rage. I grabbed him behind the head and started squeezing as hard and I could. All the while, he was turning his head from side to side to try to bite my hand, but I was grasping him directly behind the head and he had no room to bite my hand. I squeezed as hard as I could and held on for several minutes. Suddenly the snake went limp in my hand. His body twisted around and I could see the white-ivory scales of his belly turn upward toward me. In nature, this is a sign that a snake is dead. In nature, a snake never shows its soft white underbelly unless it is either fighting or dead.
Well, I said to myself, the inevitable has occurred. I guess he's gone. He won't be around to bite me ever again. So I placed his limp body into a clear plastic box and put it on the patio. Then I grabbed a shovel and went out to the backyard to dig a grave. After I had the hole dug, I sat down in front at the tv, drank a Gatorade and watched a golf tournament. Once I saw that Tiger Woods had won, I returned to burial services for my pet snake. When I went back to the patio, I picked up the plastic box and looked inside. "Slick" was as alive as ever. He was just faking death, a ploy often used in nature to get predators to relent in an attack. When I saw him alive and well, I took pity on him and decided: "Well, we'll let bygones be bygones. If he's that tough, I'll let him live." So I returned him to his cage and, over the next few months, "Slick" and I had few problems. I think he learned something from the near-death incident.
After I had had him for about a year, I decided I wanted to start breeding snakes. I was especially interested in a pair of Honduran milksnakes. At the pet shop where I had been buying rats to feed "Slick", the woman said she could get a pair of Honduran milksnakes but they would be $250. I asked if she would take a trade-in and she asked:"What do you have?"
Three days later, I returned to the pet shop with "Slick". She took the snake and wrote me a receipt which was a credit for $100 toward the purchase of the Honduran milksnakes. And "Slick" was gone, just like that.
About a week later, I went back to the pet shop and looked around for "Slick". I didn't see him, so I asked the woman what happened to him.
"Oh, we had to get rid of him," she said. "He got out of his cage one night and killed some baby kittens. We couldn't keep a snake like that."
I didn't question her as to specifics. Posing the question was like asking about the fate of an old friend. I guess that, once you have personal interface with a snake, as with humans, you can't help but wonder about their final outcome. Part of me didn't want to know what happened. I hope that whatever his fate, it was good. He contributed to my life and I contributed to his. Despite all the trouble and turmoil in our relationship, I still have fond memories.
As for my grandson--the whole reason for buying the critter, he never went near the snake again. After he was bitten on the nose during the initial encounter, he refused to even help me dry the snake off after a bath.
"That snake bit me one time too many," he said afterwards. "I'll never trust it again."
My grandson has got more sense than me.
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