“Only you can prevent snake escape,” could be the public service announcement by a cute talking snake in Florida named “Smokey.” (Oh, hold it, there is no way to make a snake look cute!). The 5-foot long boa constrictor escaped from his aquarium and was found in the garden next door.
The even worse part about people owning pet snakes is not simply the troubling nature of the fact that they see this creature as a pet, but that they themselves are … well … how to say this gently … ah … not likely to be people who scored 800 per section on the SAT.
Snake escape stories abound daily on the internet, and the clueless owner always has some version of “I just don’t know how Foofie got out of his container.” Ah, maybe they shouldn’t be in a container?
To quote the news story, “I just want to take him home,’” <the owner> said, still a little choked up at the thought of losing Smokey.
(I’m not making this up …) She said she was just glad to be able to bring the pet snake home, where she also has three Chihuahuas — Dynamite, Peanut Butter and Lucy. It seems to me that better names for those dogs would be Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner! Isn’t this a little bit like keeping a pet lion in a homemade cage in your sheep pen?
I’ll never understand the “pet snake” oxymoron.
The Word of Randy 
We had that 3x3x3 wooden box in our little room years back. It housed a snake that grew from 14″ to 5′. It was my daughter’s facination and my delight to indulge her. She posted the progressively increasing in length snake skins on her bedroom wall as it grew.
Well, we are what we are. I never took the SAT so I do not know what my score would have been, but perhaps you are right, I probably would have scored less than 800. Who knows.
Snakes…
I have handled them, owned them, fed them, caught them in the wild, been bitten by them, and even had 2 or 3 sleep around my feet once on a cold night – without realizing it of course. I have had one live in my ceiling in my basement and one get loose in my dining room. I have performed surgery on one and removed one side of its jawbone and then raised it to full grown before setting it free to catch mice in my barn. It even came back to visit me a year later – not hard to notice the missing jaw bone.
I never have figured out how to determine snake gender though. Maybe that SAT would have helped!!
Snakes – what some fear, some hate, some play with, and some kill – for no particular reason.
They have their role – even if just to unnerve one local pastor friend of mine.
We are what we are…