Note: This image is from a totally awesome book by Melanie Rawn, which features reptiles that think like humans (i.e. the only acceptable kind of reptile: the fictional magical kind)
If there’s any tried and true rule about people who own reptiles, its that their dysfunction as a human being is directly proportional to the mass of their collective body of serpents. I’ll give a pass to a guy who owns a gecko, but when you start getting anything that weighs over three pounds and requires its own habitat, then we have a problem. One can only look into the unfeeling, unthinking eyes of a snake or an iguana for so long before humanity itself starts to seem like one of many “options.”
When you’ve decided, as a human being, that you’d rather see a nine foot reticulating python slithering across your living room floor than a human child that shares half your genetic material, then I really think you ought to be institutionalized. And if you think “Hey! The floor’s big enough for both my child and my nine foot long reticulated python!” then I think that’s grounds for sterilization.
Buy a mammal.
And that was my random thought of today.
Hey! I’d take my adorable little Bearded Dragon over a human child any day!
And his eyes are very expressive… and he likes a cuddle!
You just haven’t met the right reptile yet. I’m a sucker for a scaly little face…
Call me small minded if you must, but to me there’s just something about breast feeding, hair, and bearing live young that makes sense.
thank you, i was just reading peter watts and needed something human to clense my pallet. he’s sci-fi; prefers to write about humans who think like reptiles.
my most-totally-extreme goth friend had a pet snake, but he was a cuddler and kind of a goof. got himself all knotted up in some duct tape one time. now she has a bunch of tarantulas, a bird eating spider and a giant millipede. i’m talking a tiny little bedroom with just her computer, her sewing stuff, her medical supplies, six gigantic insects and the crickets she feeds them. and a big map of the world above her bed, marked with the locations of different viral epidemics and the date of their outbreak.
i love my most extreme goth friend. i don’t think she’ll be having any babies…
It’s “reticulated python.”
Thank you kindly.
I like rabbits. The larger cat-sized breeds, particularly. We have two, one of whom was saved from being a ‘feeder rabbit’ for a snake. Snakes really shouldn’t be fed rabbits… the rabbit is highly likely to permanently injure and sometimes kill the snake before it is eaten.
My rabbits terrorized my roommate’s cat. They will save me if a large snake breaks into my apartment in the middle of the night.
See everyone? Amber loves mammals, and Amber kicks ass.
How do I know this? Because Amber loves mammals.