I don't claim to be an expert in either field, but I believe that there is a link between the two. I think there's a special place in Hell where the worst offenders are banished to, forced to live out eternity not at the wrath of an unlubed pitchfork, but at the wrath of uncaged rainbow boas. We keep eight species of snake, and two of them (green tree pythons and macklots pythons) have terrible reputations for being aggressive. They are hands-down less aggressive by our pair of adult Brazilians... when we do public educational programs, these are the ONLY snakes that we will use heavy gloves or a snake hook with because they're not the least bit hesitant to lay into my arm. In fact, the last program we did without gloves with the male in these pictures, I spent the last ~3 minutes with him latched onto my thumb. Luckily he was coiled around my arm anyway so I just had to rotate my wrist a little and nobody knew he had bitten me (he was still holding on, so it hadn't started to bleed yet).
...but they're so cool looking! I had our male out the other night getting some pictures with a new setup I put together and sure enough he tagged my hand when I wasn't paying full attention to him. I did manage to get two cool shots out of that incident - before and after:
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