S-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-somebody STOP me!

Today, dear readers, I am thinking about snakes.

Why? Because of the tragic death of two boys in New Brunswick, who are believed to have been strangled by a python that escaped from an exotic animal store underneath where they were staying, having slithered up the air ducts. The Globe and Mail has the story here.

This is how my thought process went: "Man, that's incredibly sad, and seems super preventable. I assume there will be an inquiry into the storage and safety of the pet store below, and the owner will probably be charged with negligence and manslaughter. That sucks." Further than that? There was a sense of sad stoicism, an immediate sense of "Well, that's how nature works". Thoughts of Grizzly Man, which I rewatched last week, echoed through my head. Can't blame the snake - that would be unreasonable and juvenile. So it goes, in the timeless words of Kurt Vonnegut.

However, it seems that isn't sufficient for all the torch-bearing, screaming, mouth-foaming people posting in the comments section of the article. Out of all the ones I read having posted this, almost EVERYONE shared in an outcry of "Let this be a lesson to the Federal Government to ban the frivolous keeping of such dangerous animals as pets!"

Really?

But of course! This isn't a stray accident with a terrible outcome, necessitating, perhaps, a reexamination of protocol of keeping any potentially dangerous animals safely - it is the fault of ALL SNAKES EVERYWHERE, and those who keep them are BASICALLY SERIAL KILLERS. Right? Sheesh.

Raving wild animals or raving Canadians banning them?

In a way, this mirrors common debates regarding censorship, and extreme content in popular culture (dammit - I swore this wouldn't circle back to my thesis this time...). There are those who would basically ban all movie violence everywhere forever, and there are those (like myself) who are more in favour of studying its effects on people, why people consume and enjoy such content, how they interact with it, and how to correctly identify potential dangers so audiences and parents (assuming any proactivity in parents... but that's another rant altogether) can judge accordingly.

By extension, if we ban all animals that could potentially be dangerous as pets, what about good ol' "man's best friend"? There are dog attacks every year - should we ban keeping dogs as pets? Better yet, why not kill all of them and render them extinct, on the possibility that one of them in the wild might accidentally injure some poor, defenseless human who wanders into their territory?

Look at this vicious killer. Look at the evil in its malicious eyes.

This is escalating quickly, and will soon turn into 'foot-in-mouth' territory, which is not my favourite place to be. Anyway, you get the idea. It's a very sad circumstance, and people inevitably want a larger-scale scapegoat, and it's all the government's fault. Duh. The end.

So, now that I've been reading a bit about snakes this afternoon, as a break from reading about iconicity and semiotics, here's a fact I pulled up that is sure to haunt your dreams:

#24: Decapitated venomous snake heads can STILL ATTACK YOU.

Yes really. The world is a far scarier place than you or I knew. Here's a video, if you feel like avoiding sleep tonight.

Basically, how this works, according to Cracked.com, from which I purloined this fact, is that the "heat-sensitive pits" on the side of the snake's face continue to detect threats for HOURS after its death, which means the snake head will continue to snap at you if it senses you - ie, if you are close enough to be bitten. Also, it's still poisonous, so it could totally still kill you. And, as Cracked muses, "who the hell loses a fight to a dead animal?"

Good question. Let's outlaw them as pets and kill them all so we never have to find out. Amiright?