Be carefull, Saw this on another forum…

one of my friends was just telling me about his mum’s best mate who owns a snake which was given to her as avery small “baby”

anyways she’s had it for quite some time and has always allowed it to roam free round the house, it gaining in size considerably each year etc etc. She was bonkers about this thing, although it frightened the life out of visitors, but she read up on it and fed it correctly and so on.

It used to regularly sleep on the bed with her, particularly as it became more adult in appearance. apparently it was over 17 feet long and in her opinion there wasn’t a tank large enough to house it.

anyway, about 6 weeks ago she noticed that it was behaving very unusually and it concerned her. It wasn’t acting in the normal way. It wasn’t taking food (although they can take long periods before getting hungry) and occassionally it was making weird contortions and stiffening up into a straight line which she had never seen it do before – especially at night – and it would make weird shapes etc.

so, she called a zooligy centre and asked for a recommendation for experts on large snakes and one was recommended.

after some to-ing and fro-ing, the chaop turned up a couple of days later and spent an entire day observing the snake, also examining her feeding records to see how long it had not eaten for(which was apparently an unusually long time) and also to investigate these odd contortions and behaviours.

the quote i was told was:

“I’m pretty glad you called me to have a look to be honest.

this snake is basically preparing itself to eat you.

it is starving itself to enable it to digest you, and the contortions it is making facially is it practising unhooking it’s jaw to enable to to consume you – head fiorst in all likelihood. As for the stiffening up into a straight line at night, it was basically measuring it’s body length against yours to ensure that it would indeed be able to consume your full torso”

He reckoned that within another ten days or so she would have not woken up, having been strangled by her “pet” snake, and it would then have unsusccessfully tried to consume her from the head downwards, and most probably died at the attempt of swallowing her shoulders.

From what i gather she was given a baby reticulated python as a present some years ago.

pretty lucky i reckon!