You can keep snakes and only interact with the other woodland creatures. The garter snakes eat their worms, the water snakes eat their fish, the hog nosed snakes eat their toads, the king snakes eat their water snakes and the black snakes eat their lizards. But if you want to keep snakes and make the leap from impulse power to warp drive you need a lot of one thing and one thing only – mice.
In the fifth grade we moved back to Oak Ridge, Tennessee and my mother went to work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory….. Biology Division. Being a big Biology Division the investigators needed a lot of mice, many of which were raised in the “mouse house”. Mice being mice, they made more mice so that the mouse house always had too many – mice.
Biologists being biologists, they were more than happy to support the scientific leanings of the young. Consequently, all I ever needed to do was tell my mother “I need some mice” and home came a box of pinkies, fuzzes, hoppers, regulars and jumbos. So by the summer of the sixth grade the only limit on the number of quality snakes I could keep was the available space for cages in my bedroom! And it was a fair sized bedroom.
I remember that the richest I ever felt in my youth was late high school when I managed to have in my possession five corn snakes; (plus, of course, a lot of other stuff).
The ironic thing about this mouse-sink, palace-o-snakes arrangement was my mother didn’t mind the snakes but she didn’t like mice. Now that I think back on it maybe that was part of the point; fewer mice in the world.
It probably comes as no surprise that my mother’s friends questioned her sanity. She had a standard reply which I have always since shared with mothers and kids edging toward snakes in the house. My mother would just tell her friends…”Well at least he’s not out stealing hub caps”.
ML
5/25/07
