Beware of the snake man

[JoshSloane]

Well before I ever had a snake I'd get bored at work and hop on Craigslist. I'd post a picture of a Burmese and tell everyone that "Shadow" was once fed kittens by the previous owner and will not take anything else. I'd ask in the pet section for anyone with a steady supply of baby white kittens (Shadow prefers white).

It was a fun experiment. I got a lot of emails from people telling me how much they laughed at the obvious tongue-in-cheek post and a few telling me they were reporting me to the cops and all of that. I kept it up for about a month, I laughed at the responses.

One lady wrote me a nasty gram saying she cried for a day after reading my post and that she had reported me to the FBI or something.

I found it hysterical.

Wow. This is completely unnecessary. Anti-reptile people just wait for any kind of fodder they can use to justify outlawing snakes. We don't need to give them anymore ammo. Combined with people's inability to grasp sarcasm, and this is a deadly mixture. If this hobby is going to be taken seriously by the general public, we all need to avoid rhetoric like this. We want to be seen as competent and professional exotic animal keepers, not psychos that feed cute baby animals to vicious killer pythons. What I have found when educating about reptiles is that you cant use sarcasm, innuendos, or basically anything other than direct talk. People make assumptions and hear what they want to. To be respected as a hobby by the public, we must be the first to respect the animals and how we speak about them. Pitbull owners have the same issue with people generally misunderstanding the breed. But you don't hear them sarcastically speaking off the cuff about how their pit killed a kid, or only eats cats. Be smart and don't detract from the hard work that others put into pushing our hobby forward.