Last week, while fly-fishing in some residential canals that are the Lake Okeechobee backwaters, we encountered an elderly woman walking down her back yard holding a bowl and asking if either of us (in the boat) knew anything about snakes.
We kind of looked at each other with puzzled expressions, turned back to the woman and said, “excuse me?”
The woman repeated her question and Andy volunteered, “Well, some. What can we help with?”
The woman said that a snake had crawled into her parakeet’s cage and eaten the bird and she wanted to know what kind of snake it was.
Thinking the woman to be two Geritol tablets short of her RDA we pulled up to the seawall, got out of the boat, and offered our assistance.
It turns out that a 2’ rat snake had made its way into the cage and eaten her parakeet. With the intact bird lodged in its stomach, the snake was now too fat to get back out of the cage.
When the woman discovered the snake, she got a butcher knife from the kitchen, inserted it into the side of the cage and cut the snake in two. She then repeated the process leaving her with three pieces of dead snake.
She took the piece with the bird, and squeezing like one would a tube of toothpaste, extracted the dead bird. She then dumped the entire mess into a bowl and searched for someone to identify the snake. (Which is where we came into the story.)
True stories are sooooo much better than made up ones.
Actually, I lost a pet bird to a snake once. Of course, they both belonged to us. And it was a parrot instead of a parakeet. (I didn’t like that parrot much anyway; it was a ‘gimme’ because the original owners had spoiled it & we hadn’t had much luck reforming it.) Shoulda listed to Macaw when he screamed.
Fortunately my boa never tangled with the big boy (sigO’s blue&gold macaw). They would probably have BOTH ended up dead. If for no other reason than whichever one survived would have been killed by either me or my sigO.
Moral of the story: snakes will escape from cages you’d never think they could get out of & get into places you wouldn’t believe.
Altho this rather reminds me of the phonecall my veterinary-technician sigO got at work once: “My daughter’s been scratched by a cat!!! What should I do?!!??!?”
I hate calls like that. Why are people so damn stupid? You got bit by an animal? Don’t call the friggin’ vet! GO TO A DOCTOR! A doctor that works on HUMANS!!!
Good Idea! I wonder what the odds are of saying this with a straight face and still avoiding the all-but-certain lawsuit? Oh yeah – like I said, “all-but-certain” lawsuit.
I’m in a trainging class for two days and I miss a prime opportunity to quote from my favorite British boys - Monty Python. There’s only one quote left that I can think of off the top of my head that I haven’t seen here.
Was he tired and shagged out after an exceptionally long squawk?
No attorney would take the case: meaning no offense to Michi, she doesn’t have “deep pockets”, so it wouldn’t be worth it for an attorney to represent such a plaintiff.
As for the Reader, I’m sure they’ve got a “the opinions expressed herein” disclaimer.
Dry, I meant that I wondered what were the chances of the vet’s office escaping without a lawsuit were one of their “humorously endowed” employees to utter such a statement.
