Herpetophilia

So my new pet has become quite a minor sensation in the Bengali-speaking community of my little campus town.  It is a baby ball python, no less! It's a very common species in the reptile pet trade (at least in the West where there is a flourishing niche clientele for pet reptiles), being very innocuous and low maintenance, but the mere fact that it's a snake is a shocker to most people from my culture. But indeed the shock has an element of morbid fascination to it, which makes everyone want to pay me a visit to check Bolai Riemann out (that's his name - a Bengali first name with an international last name, somewhat symbolic of the hybrid identity I see in myself - an emotionally Indian core, but an intellectually Western exterior).

My somewhat unusual choice for a pet has a little bit of background to it, however much many of my Indian friends might think it another eccentric American fad. I find snakes fascinating. The way they move, the way they flick their tongues, the way they swallow prey much larger than the girth of their necks with super elastic jaws - in general the idea of a tubular mass of muscle that  coils, constricts, sheds, hibernates 

- is very cool to me! The way a lot of people seem to be fond of a cat's purr or a dog's tailwagging. Besides being similarly lazy and phlegmatic (some people would call it "cold-blooded"), I can identify rather easily with a small python.

A lot of this liking has to do with an ideological sympathy for the demonized Other.  For more than any other kind of animal, snakes are the most often misunderstood and wronged against. Judaeo-Christian cultures are of course bristling with anti-snake propaganda - the serpent that led Eve on to the fruit and was cursed to crawl in the dust for it, St. Patrick driving snakes out of Ireland, snakes being identified with paganism and witchcraft - one could go on. Hindu lore is comparatively respectful towards them - the Nagas ("Naga" = snake in Sanskrit) being actually accorded the position of a powerful and noble humanoid tribe - but then here too the negative stories outnumber the positive ones - Vishnu's pet Garuda leading the war of the birds on the snakes,  King Parikshit being struck down by the powerful Takshak Nag and the subsequent genocide of snakes carried out by Janmejaya in a sacrificial fire as revenge- ok I promise to not delve deeper into the Mahabharata. But you get the point.

It is true that a lot of snakes are poisonous, and tend to bite humans when they feel provoked. They stay hidden in dark places quite close to human places of living or work, they are cold-blooded and impossible to tame, snake bites still cause the deaths of many people in India - these factors would obviously put humans and snakes on collision course. We have inherited our caveman instincts to be wary of creepy, crawly things that sting. But I don't see why in the modern world, where antivenin should be easily accessible at least in theory, and much has been studied and understood about snakes, us city-dwelling educated people have to still live shrouded in superstitions and false beliefs when it comes to snakes. The top misconception is that most, if not all, snakes are venomous. This is terribly untrue. More than 90% snake species are not poisonous.  Also snakes are not naturally vicious, except for a few infamous species, like the black mamba and the king cobra.  They bite only when they feel threatened, not out of general malice. Humans are not their natural prey either. 

My pet for example lives on small furry rodents and will continue to do so for the rest of his life. He will not grow beyond four and a half feet which means I can always afford the logistics required to keep him.  Dealing with snakes needs a great deal of understanding and responsibility. Since they are very very different from us as a species, common sense is of much less use in dealing with them than with our warm blooded cousins of whom we have an instinctively better understanding.  There have been many cases of Burmese pythons being released into the wild in Florida because their owners hadn't anticipated the size they'd grow to.  Then there is of course the ethical question about keeping animals that are naturally wild (and have no history of close symbiotic relations with humans)  in captivity as an "exotic" pet.  I think the fact that snakes don't have these higher mammalian brain functions that lets them feel much by way of sorrow or connection with a human makes them ideal as pets in this sense. If I am responsible with the care I provide him, I do not see how he is worse off than in the wild where he might have been eaten by eagles or jackals anyway.


I am happy that my pet is serving as a great educational tool.  Plenty of people who had earlier harbored many misgivings about snakes now see me handle and play with my pet, touch it for themselves and see how it feels more rubbery than disgustingly slimy, see for themselves how the little snake is more afraid of us than we of it (and rolls itself into a little defensive ball everytime someone tries to lift him), they look at his bright cheeky eyes and gently flicking tongue - and are assured that all snakes are not uniformly scary.


If you found this piece irritatingly defensive so far, please hang in there a bit longer! When you consider that snakes flick their tongues to convey chemical signals from the environment to their Jacobson's organs (analogous to human "smell"), they swallow their prey whole and can do with only one feeding in a few weeks, that they shed their skin periodically including the scales over their eyes, some of them are even gifted with infra-red vision, and also the very elegance of their moves ( in fact in my humble opinion they are the only animals that can look elegant while copulating - the two snakes just entwine around each other and perform a weirdly trance-inducing psychedelic dance) - you realize that they are a darned awesome creature! and given the low maintenance costs and low intensity of care needed they are the ideal graduate student pet!


ps : My interest in snakes was actually stoked as a child by a reading of this lovely book called "Common Indian Snakes" which sort of became a field guide to me in my self-styled wildlife expeditions into the neighborhood garden. The author, an American-born herpetologist who made India his adoptive home, and started a Snake park in Chennai, and a Crocodile Park nearby, goes by the interesting name of Romulus Whitaker. So I guess I should acknowledge my guru and provide a link to this fascinating TED talk by him : http://www.clicker.com/web/ted-talks/Romulus-Whitaker-The-real-danger-lurking-in-the-water-758866/