You likely know where this story is going, but it's a good read nonetheless!

It's Thursday; feeding day for my girl Angui! She's young yet, September 2014, so she's still a little uncomfortable with me picking her up from her habitat. On this auspicious day, I have everything prepared from her feeding box to her rat sitting on the counter. I open her habitat to pick her up and she clings tightly to her branch. I gently hold her, let her crawl along my hand, and unwrap her tail from the branch when I can. She snakes around my hand as she is wont to do, and I bring her to her feeding box and place my hand inside. Usually, she'll get the hint and slip right off to be ready for her feeding, but not this time. She tightens around my hand, so I start rubbing her with my thumb to get her to loosen. She looks at my thumb and pauses. I realize a bit too late what she's doing, and she strikes my thumb. It didn't really hurt, it was just shocking. Especially when she adjusted her fangs.

So I quickly move to get a pencil to remove her mouth, but as soon as she tasted my blood she released. I put her back in her feeding box and gave her the actual meal. As I go to wash off the blood, I pause to smell my hands. They smell like the raw pheasant I had just been handling. You know that saying "if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck"? Well, if it smells like food, moves like food, and is warm like food, it's food. When I realized my mistake, I couldn't help but laugh at my foolishness! I was able to take a few pictures, but due to adrenaline, they are very shaky:

The bottom of her jaw:


The top of her jaw:


The top of her jaw, the next morning. It's hard to see in the picture (bad camera) but the red dots outline her jaw and fangs perfectly: