Oh good lord, now I feel a rant coming on so bear with me....

Why is it supposedly sane, rational, thinking adults have this ridiculous need to impose their own human angst on some perfectly normal animal and it's responses? I'm sorry but I find it incredibly self-serving for that woman to use words like "panic attack" with reference to a rat, it's response as a prey and the snake's response as a predator. Her imposing her human feelings on a dynamic that is natural, that has been going on long before she was ever born and will go on long after she's dust is, for me, just the ridiculous human need to believe only our feelings and reactions "count" or can be the yardstick for all beings.

It's a rat. It might be a just nifty perfect rat but it's a rat. Rats can be many things...a nice pet, a great companion animal, a dirty thing on a garbage dump, a natural food for many predators, one of them being snakes. All the other human babbling and yapping will never change that fact.

Society confounds me. We impose human feelings on animals that don't want them (how pushy and rude is that?). We dress up dogs, carry them around and treat them as "our babies" when the poor thing just wants to run outside and crap under a tree and sniff another dog's butt. We decide our cat has "emotional issues". Makes me wonder sometimes what that says about folks.

If you don't buy into the current mentality then you don't "care". How about caring enough to actually honor the animal by letting it be what it is, fulfill it's natural role, just be...without messing it up with our muddied, angst filled human existance. Sure I refer to our snakes as "scalekids" but that's more about them being a part of our family interest and hobby than any assumption that the lovely things need any of our human attributes.

Okay rant over.