Invasive Species

[Ninurta]

Nightmares are made from snakes

100% agree! Time to take control of that Everglades Jurassic swamp.

When I was 9 or 10 my dad took me to a zoo where they had giant pythons and anacondas. I had nightmares about pythons for years. I became psychologically scared for life. I mean I've read stories about them devouring a deer, goat, even a small child. I see a snake, I kill it!

On a separate note, when I seen the thread title "Invasive Species" my mind jumped to illegals sneaking across our border for some odd reason.

Is that you, D? I ask because my son has the same story - I took him to a Nature and Science center where they had big ol' snakes - including a 16' anaconda - and I'm not sure he's over it yet!

What really got him was that they had an open display with a stuffed 6' rattle snake in it, and the rattle snake was "animated" - it would rattle when anyone walked past the display. Worked on an electric eye that started it rattling when anyone broke the beam. That freaked him out pretty bad. I think he still kills every snake he sees - but my Dear Old Dad was the same way... would not suffer a snake of any kind to live if he saw it.

I did try to show him the rattlesnake wasn't alive, and was just working on an electric eye, but he wasn't having any of that buillshit - the damned thing had RATTLED at him!

That center didn't have just snakes - it had other stuff outside, like bison and jaguars, so he got his revenge. We were walking along the trail that wound through the place. I didn't know they had jaguars there, but suddenly I heard one of them yelp out that coughing grunt they do, where it sounds like they have their head stuck in an oil drum with the echo it makes in their chest. Before I even knew what I was doing, I was over the walkway rail and into the bushes, hiding, looking around trying to spot the jaguar. Had to climb back over the rail and look sheepish while he laughed his ass off at me.

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