The Art of Keeping Snakes

CHAPTER 1:

WHAT IS THE ART OF KEEPING SNAKES?

During the last twenty-five years, the popularity of keeping snakes has surged in North America, Europe, and, more recently, Asia. More than fifty kinds of snakes are now regularly bred in captivity and over one hundred species are now regularly available through pet stores, specialized dealers, private hobbyists, and the many herp shows and events that have sprung up in recent years.

For those of us who have worked with snakes since the 1960s, the sudden rise in popularity was not shocking. It was only a matter of time before the secret got out: snakes are among the most beautiful and fascinating of all the vertebrates. Once people overcome their bias and superstitions, they quickly recognize the aesthetics of snake pattern, color, scalation, grace of movement, and behavior.

Originally, as with other animal-related hobbies, the herpetoculture of snakes had to overcome a major hurdle: determining the basic methods for keeping snakes alive for extended periods of time and successfully propagating them over several generations. Indeed, no animal-based hobby can survive or progress to the next level until this primary issue is overcome. It is only in recent years, after firmly establishing a wide variety of snake species in captivity, that American reptile keepers have followed in the footsteps of European hobbyists and begun to create naturalistic vivaria for displaying snakes.

The purpose of this book is to introduce the reader to the cutting edge of naturalistic vivaria methods. It is the combination of the intrinsic beauty of snakes and the art of designing eye-catching naturalistic displays that hobbyists call the "art of keeping snakes."

I am often asked why I keep snakes. My answer is, "Because they never fail to fascinate me." Snakes have grabbed our attention since the dawn of humankind and will not be ignored. We watch snakes with wariness-attracted and terrified at the same time. Our evolution, both biological and cultural, has been shaped in subtle ways by snakes. In several tropical areas, including Africa-the continent of our origin-deadly venomous snakes are the equivalent of living land mines. You watch for them, you carefully avoid them, and sometimes, if you step in the wrong place, you die from them.

Snakes have a psychological impact on us. They are legless aliens: suspended, fast disappearing, lurking, slithering, climbing, striking, constricting, and venomous instant death. They are the beasts that swallow their prey whole and crawl out of their skin renewed. Their image was carved into bones carried by our prehistoric ancestors and painted on cave walls. Snakes are among the most common and enduring of all mythological themes, their imprint so ancient that they rule our folklore. From Australian dream snakes to the infamous biblical tempter and the Quetzalcoatl (plumed serpent) of the Aztecs to the Great Anaconda of Amazonian Indians, they are emotional catalysts. They serve as the confrontation between states of fear and attraction, life and death, ignorance and knowledge, and nature and culture.

There are many reasons why people keep snakes, but it is worth noting that snake keepers are overwhelmingly male, which makes for some interesting psychological interpretations. Although people sometimes joke about men showing off their large pythons or boas in public, I suspect that many male keepers are attracted to the snake's remarkable hunting prowess. Anyone who has witnessed a viper or a constrictor strike a mouse or rat with blinding speed or consume its prey headfirst is amazed at the efficiency and expediency with which snakes kill and consume. It suggests miraculous powers, an incarnation of death itself, making bodies disappear and removing all evidence of existence. There is little doubt that, for men, part of the appeal of snakes is that they are lean, mean killing machines. If snakes were demure vegetarians feeding on tofu, they would not appeal to some of the more aggressive instincts of men.

Keeping snakes has other rewards. When contained in an enclosure, we are allowed to observe them and witness their beauty. As many snake aficionados and impassioned herpetologists will tell you, upon close inspection snakes are among the most beautiful of all the vertebrates on earth. But it is only under the special conditions of captivity that we are able to observe this beauty. In the wild, snakes are notoriously wary; glimpses of snakes tend to be fleeting unless captured by expensive camera equipment. One of the great secrets of snakedom is that the closer you look, the more beautiful snakes are. Close up, the linear creatures reveal their intricacies of pattern and color. Not only is there beauty of form, color, and pattern, but these features are part of an intricate geometrical overlay of finely textured scalation. The details of individual scales-their structure, keels, sheen, jewel-like iridescence, and velvety flatness-integrated with myriad patterns of color generate a kind of cellular art.

Rhyncophis boulengeri, a rare semiarbo-real colubrid from Vietnam, it is well suited for keeping in a naturalistic vivarium.

The head is the most intricate area of the snake's body. Viewed up close, it is a rich and deeply carved topography designed around the most beautiful eyes in nature-vertical black pupils encircled by gold, black, silvery white, yellow, and even pale blue.

Snakes are also mobile art. They display grace, economy of movement, and precise muscular coordination. They don't walk, run, or hop. Instead, they are moving lines-an S that zips, zigzags, and glides through the landscape.

With anticipation, curious attraction, and fascination, the snake keeper enters the scene, breaking down ancient boundaries and attempting the inconceivable. Instead of being feared and slaughtered, the legless dragon is invited to live as a guest in the keeper's home. The host cannot help but feel a kind of awe.

Art and the Animal

How does the keeping of an animal become art? It's really not that hard to imagine. After all, the Japanese make an art out of serving tea, assembling rocks in patterned sand, and training trees in small containers. To me, art is the actualization of a personal vision or message. It doesn't matter whether it's poetry, writing, drawing, the design of a car, or the way a person dresses. Art takes something out of the ordinary and forces you to notice it. A cube is a cube, but in the right context it can become abstract art.

The art in keeping snakes is the way in which it alters the normal context of snakes. It takes them out of nature and puts them in our culture, in a home or a zoological display. In nature, snakes are avoided or observed at a distance, but in containers behind the security of half-inch glass they draw crowds wherever they are displayed. The feared serpent captured and securely contained can now be safely examined up close. In this context, the snake is art. It draws attention and elicits powerful feelings and interpretations. People can put aside their fear and consider snakes for what they really are.

The idea for keeping snakes as art came to me as a result of my ongoing work developing naturalistic vivarium systems with lizards and amphibians, and through my study of snakes. At the beginning, I asked myself, "If other reptiles and amphibians can be kept in attractive displays that often develop systemlike qualities, is it possible with snakes?" My initial experiments with boas, pythons, and radiated rat snakes showed that it was feasible. It also radically changed my approach to keeping snakes and other herps (reptiles and amphibians) and raised important ethical issues. The turning point in my thinking was associated with radiated rat snakes. I had seen these snakes maintained like countless other herps under the widespread Laboratory Animal Method (LAM), an approach that I also call TEKLO (yes, it intentionally sounds like low tech), the TEchnology of Keeping herps as Living Objects.

The LAM approach essentially treats snakes as if they were small animals, such as mice or hamsters. Accordingly, they are kept in the same manner as these creatures are typically maintained in laboratories. The snakes are placed in relatively small enclosures with absorbent wood shavingtype substrate, a shelter box, and a water dish. With the TEKLO method, snakes (and other herps) are treated as objects because the sentient aspects of the living animal are largely ignored, as they are with the keeping of confined laboratory and production farm animals.

Consider radiated rat snakes: this curious, highly visual species spends great periods of time watching its environment. My radiated snakes, which are kept in a naturalistic vivarium, stick their heads out of their shelters and watch as I perform maintenance chores. They bask on branches and stacked rocks when the midday sun comes through a window and strikes the upper portion of their enclosure. They also watch from perching sites. In their vivarium, they exhibit established behavior patterns and show signs of a certain adaptive intelligence. Indeed, a number of snake species have shown an increased range of behaviors and intelligence when they are kept in larger naturalistic vivaria. Among them are common kingsnakes, corn snakes, diadem snakes, and a number of boid (boas and pythons) snakes. Seeing how snakes behave in larger, more complex vivaria-called "enriched environments" by zoos-raises the question of ethics in the popularizing and widespread marketing of the LAM method by the pet trade. The LAM method has transformed snakes into a variation of confined hamsters and mice, a disturbing thought for anyone who has...