"But I'm immune to rattlesnake venom!"

[onager]

Animal woo-woo! I've been out of work with a bad cold , and wasted some time watching the Animal Planet show "Fatal Attractions."

So I might as well bore all of you with some ranting about it. As noted below, this is sort of on-topic, since I hear the SAME DAMN ARGUMENTS right here on DU that I've been hearing on this show.

"Fatal Attractions" covers such people as the guy who had a 500-lb. tiger living in his Harlem apartment; the woman (almost my neighbor!) who shared her trailer with 10 very poisonous snakes, a couple of them illegal to even THINK about owning in Los Angeles; and the sweet little old lady who took up the hobby of feeding the wild bears in her back yard.

The snake-lady show was rather cheekily titled "Snakes In A Trailer." As a bonus, it included an Einsteinian gent in Florida who kept a houseful of poisonous snakes, including a pet king cobra. Its bite can kill an elephant.

There is a common theme running thru this show. One that I hear all the time in DU, especially in places like the Health, R/T and the Seekers On Mundane Paths forums.

That common theme is - "I'm SPeSHUL!" In this case - "I have a SPeSHul bond with the animals! They like me, they REALLY REALLY LIKE me!"

Funny thing is - all these people who had fatal/near-fatal run-ins with their "pets" had been around these dangerous critters for years, and touted themselves as experts.

e.g., Cobra-Man. When the cobra bit him, he didn't call 911, because "it didn't hurt. I just washed my hand and put on a bandage." A half-hour later, when his limbs started going numb, he tried to call 911...but by then his vocal cords were paralyzed and he couldn't speak. Or hold the telephone.

A neighbor found him just in time, cheating the world out of a really good Darwin Award.

The real experts noted (paraphrased): "Cobra venom is a neurotoxin. It causes slow paralysis. Everybody who works with cobras knows that. If he was keeping one in a cage beside his bed, he certainly should have known it."

Trailer-Lady was bitten by a Gaboon Viper, which she had to purchase illegally. The cops who found her - 3 days after she died - thought an intruder had beaten her to death with a baseball bat. Blood everywhere. That snake kills with a hemotoxin, which de-coagulates the blood and causes the victim to bleed from every bodily orifice.

That woman had already been bitten by her pet rattlesnakes several times. And - I have to emphasize this - had convinced herself that she was immune to snake venom.

Real Expert: "Snakes can control the amount of venom injected, and often give a human a 'dry bite,' with little or no venom. That doesn't mean the human is immune. It means the snake is sending a serious warning to stop provoking it."

But again, the woman had collected poisonous pets since childhood. She was just a few class hours away from becoming an accredited animal handler at the Los Angeles Zoo, where she was very well respected as a snake expert.

According to her friends and relatives: "She believed her snakes were her friends." "She free-handled her snakes every day and thought they had feelings for her." "She couldn't imagine one of HER snakes would ever hurt her..."

Boring, non-Wooish real expert: "Snakes may appreciate being fed, but they do not EVER develop any sort of 'feelings' for humans. Their brains are about the size of a walnut. They don't have the capacity for human emotions."

The Bear-Lady episode is on next week, but I've seen the previews. Quote from a neighbor: "She said, 'Oh, the bears would never hurt ME!'"

:banghead: