The  stupidity  of  keeping  dangerous  animals  as  pets

Most countries have laws against keeping dangerous animals as pets. In most countries around the globe it is illegal to capture, breed, or sell them.  Yet world-wide, there is a fascination with owning wild, bizarre, exotic, and most of the time dangerous pets.  What is this fascination with being different and the need to own something illegal and dangerous?  Who owns these animals?  And why are these animals that are owned, sold, and traded worldwide regardless of the deadly consequences doing in people’s homes?

Most of the owners of these dangerous pets are show-offs. They want everyone to admire their bravery at living that close to animals that can kill them. Hey, dummies. If you want people to see how brave you are, climb high mountains that are extremely steep especially when your greatest fear is heights. You will then be the recipient of admiration that will exceed your wildest dreams.

There is one really stupid fool who as a performer and who is a world record chaser; actually puts live Scorpions in his mouth?  Scorpions can pack quite a punch with their venomous sting. The effects of sting by a scorpion can be mild, such as minor irritation, or more severe and even life-threatening. Another side effect of a scorpion sting is temporary paralysis where the person was stung. So if a scorpion stings your hand you will lose function of your limb until the effects of the sting wear off. An adult should gradually regain feeling within a few days, and medical treatment may be needed.

There are fools who think it is cool to keep tarantula spiders in their home as pets. They grow to the size of your hand. Tarantulas have been a relatively popular pet now for several years. They are unique, quiet, and need little space, and keeping tarantulas as pets can make a fascinating hobby. However, they aren't the best choice as a pet to handle very much, largely due to stress and danger to the spider rather than danger to the handler.

Tarantulas do bite, and their bites are venomous. The toxicity of their venom is much like that of a bee or wasp. It is most likely to cause a nasty local reaction including pain, redness and swelling. However, people can have an allergic or anaphylactic reaction to spider bites in the same way that some people react to bee stings, and this reaction can be fatal. So while tarantula bites are unlikely to be fatal, you still want to avoid being bitten.

I had a tenant living in the apartment in our basement who owned a Tarantula spider. He assured me that it would not escape the glass container he kept it in.  He was wrong. It did escape during the night. There are only two phobias I have. They are spiders and heights. I was petrified. The thought of that huge spider roaming around in my house was terrifying for me. I had visions of it crossing over my body while I was sleeping in my bed. I immediately kicked the tenant out of my house and began searching for the spider with a can of RAID in my hand. I didn’t find the damned thing. Then two weeks later, I saw it crawling up the basement stairs. I got a hammer and hit it so many times; there were spider bits all over the stair.

There are stupid people who will buy crocodiles and alligators when they are little and cute and look like happy little lizards.  Have you seen the jaws on those things when they grow into maturity?  It follows that keeping one of these reptiles in a kiddie pool in the back yard is definitely not the best idea.  Just ask those people living in Florida who has found one of those reptiles under their car. In 2001, an 81-year-old man was attacked by an alligator while walking his dog on a trail between two wetland areas near the  Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel, Florida. He bled to death after his leg was bitten off below the knee. There have been many deaths in Southeastern United States from attacks by alligators.

When lions, panthers, bears and other similar animals are cute cubs; who could resist having one as a pet?  But no matter how well trained they are, when they get older, they can turn on you in a second. The fact that they like eating raw meat should be a warning that something may very well go amiss. I knew a man who had a pet bear living on his farm. One day his girlfriend went into the cage to feed it and the bear mauled her to death.

Venomous snakes appear to be considered as pets to some people. Such snakes are certainly dangerous animals to have in your home at any time. A snake collector died after his pet red spitting cobra spat on his face in the town of Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape of Mali, Africa. Emergency medics tried to revive the man, but he died soon afterwards. It was not clear how the poison entered his body. The man had a collection of 89 poisonous snakes, including vipers. The red spitting cobra is commonly found in Africa and is one of the world's most venomous snakes.

In Toronto, Ontario, a man had a pet eight-foot cobra and it got free from its container. It could be heard wandering about between the walls of the rooming house so all the tenants and the owner moved out of the house. Efforts by trained people tried to find the snake but they were unsuccessful. Three years later in  Toronto , a startling discovery was made after a number of snakes, including a venomous viper, were found in an east-end home. When wild-life people arrived, they found five reptiles, including the aforementioned snake – a four foot-long East African Gaboon viper, the latter snake being a very venomous snake.

Small boa and rock constrictors at the pet store seem harmless and kind of cute.  But they grow quite rapidly and can grow up to 12 feet in length. One of the main concerns with owning constrictors is that once they start to get too large to have as pets, some people actually just let them go and return them to the wild. That is why constrictors have been found in the wilds of Florida. Worse yet, have been known to escape.  In the year, 2000, a three and a half-year-old boy was crushed to death by a 7½-foot African Rock Python in Centralia, Illinois.

I am going to tell you of another sad case where an African Rock python killed two boys who were sleeping overnight at a friend’s home. One of the boys was six about to turn seven and his younger brother was four. This tragedy occurred in the small city of Campbellton in the province of New Brunswick in August 2013.  

They were sleeping on the second floor of a small building and on the main floor; there was a pet store owned by their friend’s father in which he kept snakes. The boys appeared not to be afraid of snakes and took turns handling small snakes.  

On the night they were sleeping over at their young friend’s home, a large 12-foot, 100-pound African Rock python which was kept in the store below and escaped out of a small hole in its glass floor-to-ceiling container in the store below and crawled up a ventilator shaft and finally above the ceiling of where it then dropped through an opening in the shaft and down onto the floor of the living room where the boys were sleeping on mattresses on the floor. The next morning the bodies of the boys were found. They had been killed by the python which was crouched nearby.

African Rock pythons are fairly aggressive and if they feel threatened, they will sink their long teeth into their victims so that they can keep a good hold on them while the snakes are wrapping themselves around their victim’s torsos. Every time the victims exhale, the tighter the snake coils around the body of the victims become. Strangely enough, the victims don’t die from asphyxiation but rather from their heart ceasing to pump blood throughout the bodies of the victims. The reason for this is because as the coils squeeze the bodies tighter, it compresses the blood vessels to the point that it stops the blood from flowing to and from the hearts and brains of the victims.

What is puzzling is how the python managed to kill both of the boys without at least one of them screaming for help. Here is something else that is puzzling. These kinds of snakes don’t kill just for fun since it takes far too much energy to squeeze their coils around a victim. They could kill for food but I think we can presume that the python had been fed appropriately. The children had played with other animals hours earlier and the scent of those animals on the skin of the boys may have lured the snake to them. Could it have killed the boys out of fear? I hardly think so. So why did it kill both boys? Where they sleeping when the snake attacked them? Where they temporarily awake when they were being squeezed to death? When I learn of the answers to these questions, I will let you know what they are as an UPDATE to this article.

The cruel irony of this sad event is that the father of the boy’s friend who owned the pet shop didn’t have permission from the province to own an African Rock python.

I have absolutely no sympathy for anyone who keeps dangerous pets in their homes. The sympathy I have for such dolts is no different than the sympathy I have for drunk drivers who kill themselves while they are speeding out of control down a highway. If these fools who keep dangerous pets in their homes or on their property are killed by their pets, their stupidity is what did them in. If someone else is killed by their dangerous pets, then they should pay dearly for their asinine behavior.

 UPDATE:  The African Rock python has been euthanized. A couple from Branford, Ontario had 40 ball pythons in their possession and were evicted from their home. The police discovered them in a motel on August 16th with their five young children and a baby. Some of the snakes were as large as 1.5 metres in length. The snakes were in distress which I guess means that they needed food.