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Snakes


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Well, I don't love them eating my dog, but I'm not phobic about them either. They're wild animals, and like many wild animals they'll bite or kill your ass when provoked or even if just given the chance.

Grizzly bears are kinda cute, but I keep out of their way.

--eric

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Love 'em, though not as pets.

When I was a wee lad Marlin Perkins of Wild Kingdom fame was the curator of the St. Louis Zoo. His specialty was reptiles. So perhaps he was a positive influence on me. That and not reading Genesis until a very late age. ;)

From about age 9 until my teens we'd run around in the woods and meadows and sometimes catch snakes for fun, though often as not just enjoy watching them. Garters and racers didn't like to be handled anyway, though hog-nosed snakes were always fun to come across. The latter are great at bluffing, either by puffing up with air & hissing or playing dead.

Once in a great while we'd come across a king snake which was always a treat. As a constrictor it felt like you were holding a muscle. Unlike garters they seem to know that biting a big human probably isn't going to achieve a desired result so they tend not to do so. I've always been proud of the fact that as teens we were aware that a pet store in town would have given us $15 (in the late '70s mind you) for one but we always let them go where we found them.

I've always been kinda disappointed that in all my desert hikes I have yet to see a rattlesnake. Though last year in Canyonlands I saw a number of good sized gopher snakes which were cool to see slither around the slickrock.

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I also owned a couple of snakes growing up.  Mom used to pet its little head with her finger like it was a dog!  Full name of my garter snake:  Sly and the Family Snake.

Cool! I like your snake's name.

I had a few garters, too. It was so long ago that I can't remember if I named my snakes at all. I do recall going to the grocery store with my mom, as a trying-to-be-very-hip seven-year-old with a boa casually draped around his neck. This attracted far less attention than one might imagine, perhaps because it was in Berkeley, California, in 1968.

My mom made me get rid of my boa when my brother was born. She kept having nightmares about the snake getting loose and "constricting" the baby. Funny thing was, the snake was only about a foot long and had trouble even with the anemic white mice it was fed bi-weekly.

Edited by Kalo
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