Anyone else here afraid of snakes???

[cchardwick]

It's funny, I have absolutely no innate fear of snakes at all, in fact when I see one in the wild I'm always tempted to catch it and pick it up!

That being said, I do have a snake that when I first got it I was terrified of it, in fact I put it up for sale for awhile but changed my mind later on and decided to keep it. I bought my five foot long 1400 gram Australian Woma python from a guy on Kingsnake.com and when he shipped it he didn't use enough packing and the snake got all beat up. I initially put him in a glass critter cage with a screen top and a large snake hide. He was so aggressive that he would coil up and give me the evil eye from across the room and strike the glass so hard I thought the tank was going to break! Talk about a terrifying experience. He was so mean I was afraid to even take him out of the tank or even to feed him.

After about three months I moved him over to my new ARS rack system and that's when everything changed. I finally was able to handle him for short periods, eventually he became very tame and now is one of my tamest snakes. It took him about four months to finally eat something and now he is on small rats. You can still see the scars along his back from where he got beat up in the mail. Now I'll never ship a snake to my house, I always have them hold it at the FedEx center for pickup.

If you are not afraid of snakes I'm betting you have never encountered a really big mean snake! It's like saying you are not afraid of dogs. If you met the wrong dog you would be very afraid! In general I'm not afraid of snakes, but I know there are snakes out there that can be terrifying.

[Coluber42]

I've always loved snakes and have never been scared of them. But what really does get me like a sucker punch to the gut is seeing them as roadkill. Maybe it's just because I've had them as pets since I was old enough to buy one with my allowance as a kid. Of course roadkill is never pretty, especially when it's an animal that you have some sort of personal up-close experience with. But there's something about the image or idea of a snake getting run over that is just especially viscerally awful.

I do a lot of road bicycling, and mostly don't see that many snakes on the road. But I live in fear of running over one, to the point where I hate even seeing cars run over bits of rope or skinny pieces of old truck tire tread or other long skinny pieces of roadside debris. It always makes me jump until I realize it wasn't a snake. I guess in that sense I'm sort of lucky that I live in an area where I'd be extremely unlikely to come across a live snake on the road for about half the year!

[cchardwick]

I've always loved snakes and have never been scared of them. But what really does get me like a sucker punch to the gut is seeing them as roadkill. Maybe it's just because I've had them as pets since I was old enough to buy one with my allowance as a kid. Of course roadkill is never pretty, especially when it's an animal that you have some sort of personal up-close experience with. But there's something about the image or idea of a snake getting run over that is just especially viscerally awful.

I do a lot of road bicycling, and mostly don't see that many snakes on the road. But I live in fear of running over one, to the point where I hate even seeing cars run over bits of rope or skinny pieces of old truck tire tread or other long skinny pieces of roadside debris. It always makes me jump until I realize it wasn't a snake. I guess in that sense I'm sort of lucky that I live in an area where I'd be extremely unlikely to come across a live snake on the road for about half the year!

I actually almost hit a snake driving about six months ago. I was changing lanes and didn't see it until the last minute, it was smack dab in the middle of the highway. It was a coiled up rattlesnake, the biggest one I've ever seen!

[Coluber42]

If you are not afraid of snakes I'm betting you have never encountered a really big mean snake! It's like saying you are not afraid of dogs. If you met the wrong dog you would be very afraid! In general I'm not afraid of snakes, but I know there are snakes out there that can be terrifying.

That's a good point, but there is a distinction. I take being "afraid of snakes" in general to mean a phobia to some degree - an automatic fear reaction. That's not the same thing as fearing a specific individual that actually has the ability to hurt you and is acting threatening. When I was in grad school, I had a housemate who was afraid of dogs and spiders. If there was a speck on the wall that she didn't remember seeing before, she'd scream and refuse to go in that room until someone checked to make sure it wasn't a spider (this was in an area that does not have any dangerous spiders or insects). If someone was walking a geriatric lap dog with three legs, she would cross to the other side of the street. She knew perfectly well that these things weren't actual threats, but she was afraid of them anyway.
She was an extreme example, but that's what I take "afraid of snakes" to mean. Being perfectly happy to keep that retic in the food mood on the other side of the glass, or even just that grumpy and defensive woma python, is not really the same thing.

[dkatz4]

This is a really interesting thread, it got me thinking. I do have a very particular fear of snakes, and that but s why I love them. I realize that I regard them sort of like horror movies, they both initiate a fear/adrenaline/pleasure reaction in me that i just crave (luckily snakes don't keep me up at night like horror movies do). I think that's why I'm so obsessed with getting a bigger boa soon, I am by no means bored with my little Central American male, but I have absolutely no fear of him. I think back to when I first got him (my first snake) and that aforementioned sensation as I handled him, not knowing if he was just exploring or looking for a soft spot to bite, and I miss it! Now I'm considering carpet pythons not only b/c they are a bit less predictable, but also their faces scare the hell out of me!

[Reinz]

Compared to the sweet mustached face of a Boa, Carpets with that gangster grin can be scarey looking. But all of mine are absolute sweethearts!



Lizzy, Coastal Carpet

[mom_of_bananachip]

Hmmm...

I never liked snakes. I always thought they felt like leather boots gone zombie... always did my best to avoid them.

I recently got interested into snakes. One of my students brought his bp to my class, and I became hooked ever since. My brother has always said that everyone is afraid of snakes, until they meet a friendly one.

A