A snake in the grass

My ex-wife was bitten by her pet ball python earlier this week. We had gotten it as a gift ten years ago when a fellow teacher of hers brought it back from a pet store in Houston, Texas. It was newborn and so small that the friend flew from Houston to Little Rock with the snake in her pocket. It would literally fit in the palm of your hand.

We bought an aquarium and a heating unit and a rock and all the other things that snakes need to survive in captivity. In the beginning, we would lose it in the aquarium because it was so tiny. We started it out on a diet of baby mice and, as it grew, we graduated to full-grown mice, baby rats, full-grown rats, and eventually guinea pigs. The snake grew to almost seven feet in length. Linda would keep it in her kindergarten room as a teaching tool and often got it out to let her students play with it. It was completely docile and, as strange as it may sound, became a part of our family, except for son Michael. He has never liked snakes and didn't like this one either so he never played with it and, in fact, would leave the room when one of us would take it out. I played with the snake often and we developed a routine where, after a bit of handling, I would sit down in my recliner and the snake would crawl up under my shirt and coil up on my chest where it was nice and warm. I would often watch a night's worth of television with the snake asleep on my chest.

When Linda and I divorced, she kept the snake and everything remained the same until she changed the heating unit in the aquarium a couple of weeks ago. Because of that, the temperature was too high and the snake sunburned its belly. Linda took it to the vet and the vet gave it a couple of shots, while Linda held its head. She said she could tell the shots were painful to the snake because of the tensing of its body. A few days later, it was time for the snake's monthly feeding. Linda went to the pet store, bought a guinea pig and went home to feed the snake. As she had done hundreds of time before, she opened the lid and began to remove the water bowl and the rock so the snake would have plenty of room to maneuver to find its dinner. As she reached her hand into the aquarium, the snake struck, latching onto to her right hand. Although pythons are not poisonous, the pain was instant and severe and the snake was holding on. She had to pry its mouth off her hand with her free hand. It was the first time the snake had ever struck at anything or anybody except its prey.

What the snake did was understandable in animal terms. A hand coming into the place where the snake lived was nothing new. It had been conditioned for that for ten years. It had never struck before because there was no fear or pain associated with a human hand. But the last time Linda stuck her hand into the snake's abode, the snake was removed, taken to the vet and encountered pain. When the hand appeared again, the snake responded to the hand as a perceived threat because now the snake associated the hand with its own pain. The snake is no longer a family pet. It's gone, because Linda can no longer trust the snake and the snake can no longer trust Linda.

We would respond the same way if any pet attacked us, whether there was a justification for the attack or not. When we are no longer able to predict the animal's behavior and when, consequently, we no longer feel safe around the animal, the animal has to go.

It's amazing that we don't treat people who abuse and attack us the same way. Getting rid of a pet that has struck out against us is a no-brainer. It would be foolish to keep a pet around when we can't depend on its behavior being non-confrontive. But we respond differently to people. We often times keep them around even when they attack us. Even when we don't feel safe around them, even when we never know when their next outburst toward us is going to come. We do this because people, unlike animals, have a way of making us feel like their attack against us is OUR fault. That if we would act differently or talk differently, or dress differently, or stop doing something, or start doing something, the attacks would stop. Victims of emotional and physical abuse find themselves in this quandary often. The controller in the relationship is able to convince the victim that whatever the controller is compelled to do is the fault of the victim, not the responsibility of the offender. If a dog chomped down on our ankle and drug us across the room, we would immediately get rid of the dog. But if a person does that, we often don't. Amazingly, we oftentimes even end up apologizing for making him do to us whatever he did. Because, using the tools of manipulation and control he has learned so well, he's able to make us believe that any punishment we receive at his hands is our fault.

It isn't.