Puppies And Kittens And Snakes, Oh, My!

LIFE IS A SERIES OF CHOICES. The choices that some people make mystify me. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t have the right to make their choices – I just don’t get the why and the how sometimes.

What I’m talking about today is People and their Pets.

Don’t get me wrong. I love animals. I love pets. I have been a pet owner many times and cried like a baby when they died. I’ve had dogs, cats, fish, and, for a short time, a parakeet. That bird and I just didn’t get along. I’d give him seeds and he’d throw them back at me. I got him to perch on my hand only once. He called me an obscene name, bit me, and went back into his cage, slamming the door. I gave him away to a friend who owned a cat.

I used to know this gal. A Brit she was, educated at Oxford, spoke seven languages, and traveled the world in her job with a Fortune 500 company. She had a pet Boa Constrictor. She purchased a 10 ft. long display case from a defunct jewelry store and turned it into “Constrictor Acres.”

Snakes (and Talent Agents) are cold blooded creatures and I can’t imagine that her snake ever felt about her in the way a kitten or a puppy feels toward its human. One does not cuddle with a 12 ft. long Boa Constrictor – more than once.

My friend loved that snake. She doted on it. I think the snake was skeptical of the whole arrangement. It wasn’t natural even though she tried – mainly at feeding time.

Watching her feed the snake was unnerving and effectively killed any desire I had for my own lunch.

The problem was – Boa Constrictors will not eat anything that is not alive. They like their food fresh. Very fresh.

My friend’s solution was to feed her Boa with live rats. She had an arrangement with a company that supplied rats to laboratories. She kept her pantry full of rats – strictly white rats for some reason – in the kitchen.

When dinnertime for the snake came around, every two weeks, she would grab a rat and head to the display case. It bothered her to just toss the rat into the case and watch it scurry about looking for a way out until the inevitable happened. To avoid having to watch the “rat du jour” run for its life my friend came up with an answer that satisfied both her and the snake. It didn’t do much for me – or the rat.

The rat had to be alive. That was an immutable technicality. She demonstrated her solution. She would grab the rat by his hind legs, swing him through the air and slam his head onto the edge of the display case, knocking him into next Tuesday, and then toss him into the case. The snake was OK with this, but I found it kind of creepy. She didn’t kill the rat, but I thought that her method made her sort of an “Accessory before the fact.” It all came too close to being a “Schrödinger’s Rat” scenario.

I don’t know why she didn’t get a puppy. It would have been so much easier to feed, with a much smaller load of Karma.

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