Danzig, the Python

This is Danzig, my brother's python. He's an African Ball Python, or Royal Python, so named because he rolls up into a ball when sleeping or threatened. Or eating. Or really just anytime. Either way, I love him.

It's hard to tell what a snake is thinking. He can't complain about his weight, tell you why he's so sleepy today, or give you a thumbs up if he approves of the cuisine. Before I met Danzig I assumed all snakes were dirty slithery things, but this little python is different. He, in fact, is CHARMING. He moves slowly -- takes life at his own pace. He's often seen cocking his head in all directions and staring for minutes at a time. We believe it to be a characteristic of his inquisitive nature, but it may also be because he can't blink. He has a keen sense of smell and an appreciation for different cultures -- he thoroughly enjoys both my old sneakers and my bag of dirty gym clothes. If you're lucky, he'll pulsate on you -- he curls around your arm like a bracelet and squeezes -- one long muscle in waves of flexing and unflexing. I like to think it means he loves me, but it could also mean he's practicing for when he gets bigger and can kill me.

Though he is now a toddler, Dannie may someday be six feet long. His jaw 'unhinges' into four pieces and he 'yawns' often to stretch it out. This means that if he ever learned to think of us as food, he could suffocate us to death and swallow us whole if so desired (though he'd be extremely uncomfortable for a very long time). Pythons are one of the few snakes that still have remnants of their legs -- they're called "anal spurs" -- but they're on either side of his genitals so it's not like you want to be handling them all the time.

We feed him live mice. It's possible to ween a snake off of live feed -- you can feed them Mice-icles, but Thailand has yet to carry such delicacies. Another option is red meat, but it has to be the right temperature and moving, which means you put a mouse-sized piece on the end of some tongs and make it dance so the snake thinks it's live prey. If this doesn't work, you can rub the meat on any spare dead mice you may have lying around to impart the smell of the snake's favorite dish. The mouse-killing thing saddened me, until I remembered that I eat meat too -- I just have other people kill it for me.

The only time I've seen Danzig move quickly is at dinner. Some Ball Pythons are finicky eaters, but not Danzig. When Dannie was smaller, my brother once held him above a box of live mice to say, 'Look, Danzig, see what I got for you?" when suddenly one mouse was gone, Danzig was rolled up in a ball with four little mouse legs sticking out the top, and my brother was hurling the whole package across the room in fright. He's like lightning, Dannie is.

Egg-bearing animals often have salmonella on their skin, so though it really may be the kiss of death, we kiss him goodnight anyway. I usually do a nose rub instead. He probably hates it but has learned to love us back in his quiet way.