Quote Originally Posted by Skiploder View Post
My first snake (when I was a kid) was a hognose.

A couple of years later, I wanted to get a second snake. I saved up my money all winter shoveling snow out of driveways and decks and had my dad drive me to the pet store to pick out a new snake.

They had a pair of beautifully colored snakes in a glass tank. For fifty bucks, I bought the pair. They were a male and female yamakagashi (later found out to be rhabdophis tigirinis - Japanese spp.).

This was the seventies, and no one knew anything about these snakes.

It was later discovered that these were venomous snakes, with a hemorrhagic venom similar to that of dispholidus typus - the boomslang.

It was also discovered that these are on of the world's only poisonous snakes.........but that came much much later.

They were the first snake I bred - and sold the babies to local pet stores that carried reptiles.

When I was about 17 years old, I came home from school and my mother told me that a person from Scales and Tails had called and that I needed to call him back. When I called him back he told me that there had been a news article about several deaths attributed to these snakes and that I needed to pick up the babies that I had dropped off a few weeks before.

To make a long story short, I have had these animals in my collection for over 30 years and have never had one offer any to bite. I've been bitten by more pits than any of the rear fangers I keep.
http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0129-snake.html
Is this the same snake...it says that its venom it gets from eating poisonous frogs and toads. So does that mean if you don't feed it these animals, that they become no longer venomous? Like the poison dart frog?