back in the day

remember back in the day when you wanted a snake and your mom freaked, well i remember that day. i begged and pleaded and now i am an owner of a couple of snakes, how did you convince you parents. This is just a post for old time sake and might help a few young "herpers" convince their parents, everybody has a different way tell yours!

No convincing on my part. My first snake was an eastern hognose my dad found for me :D

It took three years and a free snake from my step-dad's co-worker. I still can't get her to agree to another but she doesn't seem to mind my CWD (no convincing for that, we went for a Guinea Pig, walked out with a CWD. xD While yeah it was an impulse buy, my step-dad is a total lizard person and has owned two before.) Ugh... I'm just hoping that another free snake will pop up soon....

My mom said "No, I don't want to have to take care of it."

I tried to get one for 7 years. then I moved out, and got one. Now I have 3 and am planning on owning at least 5.

lol how convienent of this thread... im trying to convince my mom... im even selling my beloved time and money abosorbing reef aquarium to convince her and to make room for one... after i sell it she really has no choice.... and im paying for all of it!!!!

I snuck a gartersnake into my house once when I was little. My mom was not happy to find it living in my terrarium and he had to go. It was just a little one :D

She's deathly afraid. I couldn't convince her.

Within a month of having my own place I had a snake. In 3months I had 3. :P

The pattern didn't continue. I've managed to hold off on more for a year but now I'm looking for a baby red tail. Snakes are like potatoe chips you can't just have one.

mine really wasn't my parents they where pretty cool about it was my wife but now she loves hold them and watching them just doesn't like to watch them eat just the other day i came home from work and had the big bp around her neck i was so happy:D

took moving out on my own and begging my wife for 4 yrs

I begged, pleaded and did everything that you can imagine from the time that I was ten trying to convince my snake-a-phobe mother to let me have a snake, but to no avail. I finally snuck a pair of garter snakes into my bedroom (I slept in the basement). One of them got out and showed up a year later upstairs in one of my mother's shoes! I continued to beg and plead with her. Finally, after I wrote a report on why I should have a snake and got notes from several of my teachers explaining my dedication to reptiles, she let me have one! The rest is history. So, my advice to anyone in the same predicament is to show your earnestness, your dedication and your passion for the hobby. This might just win that stubborn parent over.

couldn't do it.

it took moving out and being fortunate enough to be married to someone that doesn't mind too much.

She's even going to let me have two.

It actually isn't the snake that bothers her. She just doesn't like the frozen mice in the freezer. She thinks they are cute and feels bad for them.

Guess what im going through that right now.But me and my mom made a deal if i get A's and B's i can get a BP morph (pastel):banana:

it took me taking apart my aquarium and reciting some major facts and stuff to win my mom over. She was more like " haha you really don't want a snake!" But I was all " heck yeah I do!" The rest of my family thinks I'm a weirdo... prolly cause I got a snake tounge ring, belly button ring all in one year. I love them and hate them at the same time. They are soooooooooooooooooooo closed minded..

I never asked.. I had been keeping tarantulas for a couple years and I went out and bought a corn snake, she didn't know I had it for a while but she wasn't mad when she found out. I did tell her when I got my next two snakes (ordered both from Kathy Love - another corn and a BP). She was scared the BP would get huge but she didn't stop me. After that I just got them when I wanted, I did the same thing with my gliders.

The only thing I had to work with her on were my cats.. I don't think she cared about the animals that took minimal care and lived in cages, the cats were a little more real to her so they were a little harder to convince her about, but even then if I wanted a cat I would get it that day.

Never had a snake while I lived with my parents so I never had to convince them. If I had to guess I'd say it wouldn't have taken much to convince them. They were always OK with the amphibians I used to keep as a kid.

My dad wanted one too, since he's a huge animal fan especially lizards, my mum on the other hand hates reptiles. I first started out with a Chinese Water Dragon which I kept in my room so my mum never had to see it. After a couple months of owning him, mum asked me if she could handle it, which of course I was over the moon about and pleased she is trying to over come her fears of reptiles. After another month and a half of handling him every other day she finally agrees of letting me get a snake. Went to the pet store where I saw an stunning Mojave, I did ask her if I could borrow a extra £50 (I had to buy the snake and tank) she said no so I settled with an amazing Blood Red Corn snake. Then about two weeks later I bought a Candy Cane.
Two years later I went one a very long, two month holiday to Liberty, Missouri visiting my family. My dad did clean out and feed my Corns and Dragon but got fed up with it, so my mum decided to sell them all. I never gotten the money for it and still haven't properly forgiven her for it.
That's my sad and depressing story. :D

well i went from 2 to 9 i think in a year off topic but im trying to convince my mom to let me get 2 lip piercings like the singer off of disturbed
http://www.youtube.com/results?searc...1&oq=disturbed
they look like horns on another note this is my favorite song and my moms not impressed:rockon:

wow..this is like hitting me with a "way back" stick!

I told my mom it (a haitian boa from a friend) followed me home .. :rofl:
I cannot remember WHY she let me keep it but she did. It didn't fly well when it got out and ended up in the laundry basket. I was not allowed to take it out at all.

My parents weere cool with me getting my first BP. However, I picked up another snake at the last expo I went to and when I come home for break they're gonna be in for a big surprise...We'll see how they take it.:rolleyes:

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Originally Posted by OhBalls

I told my mom it (a haitian boa from a friend) followed me home .. :rofl:

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lmfao now THATS funny..

i wasn't into reptiles when I lived w/ my mom, but im sure she wouldn't have cared as she let me have what ever i wanted as long as she didn't have to take care of it.

but when i was with my ex.. thats a different story.. it took months of begging for a gecko.. then months of begging and pleading eyes for a snake. does that count? lol

cool stories

i never got to own one when i was a kid at home. my mom was scared of them and my dad has some weird thing about not wanting a pet that eats other animals.:rolleye2:

i have just one now, my wife doesn't like her but yet i don't like her 2 puppies that like to poop either. thinking of getting another one soon.

How did they take it??? Well, I'll admit I didn't even ask lol I just showed up at home one night with a ball python. It was stupid I know but I've always kept weird animals and my parents never cared. I had to give up all of my chinchillas (I had 11 at one time), my leos and my rats when I joined the Army 3 years ago and I was dying for an animal so I got a BP (it was kind of an impulse buy but I quickly found this site and got everything right for her lol). So I show up at home and my dad, keep in mind he's 6'4" 250+ lbs and I've never seen him scared of anything in his life, THREW A FIT! He's apparently scared to death of snakes! My mom loved her , all my brother loved her but my dad was not having it.

He actually kicked me out of the house! He told me either I put her in the freezer or he was calling the cops. So I grabbed all of my stuff (luckily I hadn't really even unpacked since I got back from the Army lol) and moved in with my gf for a couple months.

So fast-forward. I'm now living at home again (hate it but it's cheap) and I now have 17 snakes (with three more coming soon) lol. My dad is still a little baby around them but he tolerates it because he knows I love them.

Sorry for the long post lol. Just wanted to share :banana:

What a fun thread! Lets see. I didn't have a snake as a kid but played with garter snakes that I caught then released.

It took me 24 years to talk my husband into getting one, lol. When he was 5 some kids threw a live snake at him and since then was very afraid. It was when I found a baby rat snake last year that he finally relented. (I released the rat back after finding out you can't keep snakes here you find) I then got a corn. In August I went to a herp show and got my bp and king I have now. I promised him no more snakes but not sure if he believes me, lol. Right now I have 3 dogs, 2 cats, 9 fish tanks (down from 30) and 3 snakes.

My dad did not want me to have any but my mom talked him into it after about five months. I remember my first trip to our local desert in Palm Springs to catch my snake. I wound up catching two desert Rosy Boas and a Long Nose Snake, I have been hooked ever since.

Gary

took me up until 6th grade to convince them and now i have 3 my mom likes them just not the eating part

I never had to convince my parents...the only person I had to convince was myself. I was bit by a garter snake as a kid and after that was terrified of snakes. I even had recurring nightmares about them for years. And now BOTH my kids wanted a snake and I wasn't having it! Well until my son (who was 8 at the time) explained what a silly fear it was for Mommy to have...yes it took the logic of an 8 year old to change my mind. We had been to reptile shows and pet stores and my kids would hold snakes like it was no big deal and I finally figured if they could do it so could I :rolleyes: In the beginning I was very hesitant to take them out of their enclosures much less hold them - I think I wore gloves for the first month or so (plus long sleeved baggy sweatshirts so they couldn't bite me). I look back now and laugh :P

So now we have 3 BP's and I don't know how I ever lived without them :D

I told my mom that i was getting one, she said no, I went out and got one, she said it couldnt come in the house, i brought it in the house, she said she doesnt want to ever have to see it, and I play with her all the time.

My parents (mainly my mom) and I share a true love for animals, so we've always had a lot of them around. To be honest I haven't owned a reptile until a few weeks ago.

I'm older and live on my own so I didn't have to ask anyone, still I'm fairly certain my parents would have been okay with a snake as long as I agreed to take care of it and showed I had the knowledge to do so.

Not an issue in my house :)
My son wanted a ball python and so we did the research together and we now have 13 of them with a couple of them breeding this year.
When I wanted to get some boas, no one blinked an eye! :D

like many of you, i have a mother who is a snake-a-phobe. if she ever accidentally wonders into the reptile room in the pet store she freezes up, closes her eyes, and screams for help lol.

"lucky" for me my parents were trying to go through a divorce. man, my mom grew a pair then. she was taking chances like she never did before and really taking the reigns. i guess she was pretty happy to be getting rid of my dad. (or so she thought)

anyway, about that time a friend of mine had to get rid of his black rat snake. he was borrowing the cage from his aunt, and she needed it back and he was left with nowhere to put the snake. i found a tank and begged my mom for the snake. pleading, "the poor little guy has nowhere to go!" and "i'm just going to take care of him for a little while till we find him a permanent home" (yeah right)

she finally caved in and said i could "hold" the snake. i went to go pick up hermin, the black rat snake. it became quite clear to me, my own uneasyness for snakes. i was very nervous and i relaized that that was the first time i had ever touched a snake. for some reason that had never occured to me before i went to go pick him up. my friend put him in my hands and he noticed i was shaking, which i tried to play off lol. but i was determined, i was going to like hermin even if it killed me. lol.

i got hermin home and "all set up". at that time i had no idea what "all set up" was. i actually got the aquarium from my grandma and it didn't have a snake-proof lid so i proceded to take some chicken wire and ductape it around the top. bad idea. hermin lifted the tape off the cage and escaped 3 times before i figured out what kind of lid he needed. i got 2 different calls at work from my mom, screaming, telling me to come home right now find the snake.

we all finally got used to hermin, and 3 months later i found a new snake that i liked, but my mom said i couldn't have any more. so i got rid of hermin, and got a new one. i still have her. Lady, the amel. corn snake. i still regret getting rid of hermin, he had a little bit of an attitude, but he was my first and i really loved him. unfortunately, the pet store i was letting sell him, let him out in their yard because nobody would buy him. i was really upset, and glad to see the hole-in the-wall pet store go under a few months later.

thats the end of hermin, my first snake.

I never managed to convince them, than I grew up settled and made up for it since than. :gj:

I remember asking my mother for a snake when I was 13 and again when I was 16, but she never budged, so in turn, I waited until I turned 18 and on my 18th B-Day, I got my first bp. :D

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Originally Posted by FloridaHogs

No convincing on my part. My first snake was an eastern hognose my dad found for me :D

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No convincing for me either I have been around snakes since i was 4 at my grandparents pet shop in Corpus Christi, Tx. So my parents were pretty cool about the idea. I was 14 when I got my first.

I wanted a pet snake for as long as I can remember. My mom was fine with it, but my dad is deathly afraid of snakes. He wasn't havin it. I'll never understand this. It is a completely irrational fear when you know the facts. No reason to be scared of a ball python, corn snake, even a garter snake would have been fine for me. I just wanted a snake! lol. Even if it did escape from it's cage, what was it gonna do? Snakes stay in a cage, make no sounds, don't smell, and don't bother anybody. It literally has zero effect on everyone else living in the house except for the fact that they know it is in the house.

Anyway the first thing I did when I moved out was get a ball python. I remember searching on KS for a normal female (b/c they get bigger :D) and seeing some of the more subtle morphs (subtle to the untrained eye at least) like mojave, cinnamon, yb etc. I thought to myself "Who would spend that much money on a ball python, especially when it looks just like a normal or maybe a tad different."

So I got my normal female and then started perusing various forums to find the answers to the questions I had about husbandry. That's when I started to learn more and more about the various morphs and the bug hit me. You should have seen the look on my Dad's face when I told him I was breeding ball pythons. It was something like this :O. Haha. He also let out a loud "Whaaaaaaaat?!?!?!?!" and rolled his eyes. So my mom doesn't care, my sister doesn't care, my brother thinks they are pretty cool, and my dad thinks I'm a nut.

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Originally Posted by Mike Russell

I wanted a pet snake for as long as I can remember. My mom was fine with it, but my dad is deathly afraid of snakes. He wasn't havin it. I'll never understand this. It is a completely irrational fear when you know the facts. No reason to be scared of a ball python, corn snake, even a garter snake would have been fine for me. I just wanted a snake!

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I'm with ya there brotha! See my post above lol. My dad kept trying to come up with all these reasons why keeping a snake is a bad idea like, "well they treat them inhumanely when they import them." True but none of mine are imports they're all CB babies. Also he's got two HUGE salt water fish tanks, I just point at them every time he says that and say, "Yeah? You think all those fish were treated humanely when they were caught and stuck in a box to be shipped over here?" IDK it's just funny, it's a running argument with us but, eh he knows I'm absolutely passionate about herps and doesn't mind as much anymore. Someday I may even get him to hold one without him trying to kill it!

I never did convince my mom but my had had exotics all his life so he was fine with it. I didnt get one tuill I was married. My wife is afraid of them (hopefully going to change soon.

I begged and begged...then just went out and got one after I turned 19...I pay for all my animals so my parents couldn't argue. I told them it was the snake or a Kinkajou >.> *I plan to get the kink anyway when I get a better job*

Not so "back in the day" for me. My husband has always wanted a snake since he was little and his mom never allowed it. Then he married me and I'm scared of snakes until a few months ago (11 years later). And what made me change my mind is a new reptile store opened not too far from where we live and my husband and 2 kids would spend every weekend in that store drooling over the reptiles. And these people who owned the store would just take a snake out and put it on your palm like it was no big deal. So, finally, a pastel ball python showed up in one of the tanks and I loved the bright yellow colors, so I told my hubby to go ahead and get it... one more month later I touch it for the first time. And my son got his own spider ball. Today, we took both snakes to the school and had a show-and-tell with my hubby and my sons. So, hopefully, that would show the other parents as well that it's not really something to be scared of...