A couple of days ago I was cleaning my racks and needed to move my large adult female cinnamon BP. She was sprawled out in her tub and when I touched her she tensed and then rolled her body mass (mid section) to shove / push against my hand in a "go away" manner, lifting part of her body off the ground. She did this twice more before I managed to remove her from her dirty tub.
I have experienced BPs tensing up, flattening out, etc. but have never seen this kind of behavior in person. I did once see this sort of a behavior in a video of a reticulated python about a year ago. The person that posted it said that this was proof of the retic's intelligence, as it was not threatened by the human, but wanted the human to go away. I found that interesting at the time and had never seen anything similar until this week. Both the retic and my BP made a horizontal "wave" like motion with their body to do the pushing action.
I'm thinking that since her shoving me was not effective in getting me to go away that I won't see the behavior again. It's too bad I didn't get a chance to record it. I'll be curious to see how many people have experienced a behavior like this before.
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