RE: Re: RE: Re: Deadly Snakes
I drive a car, I live in a house where deadly electricity runs through the walls of every room and through cables within each room, I have knives in my kitchen, I walk down the street among people with unknown intentions, and so do hyper-protective parents etc. I keep elapids, I don't freehandle and I expect that if my life is cut short unexpectedly, it is much, much, much more likely to be due to one of the first few examples of my 'crazy risk taking behaviour' than the snakes.
Okay, so I don't freehandle elapids (any more
), but then again, I rarely freehandle any of my non venomous snakes and as others will point out, I don't freehandle my pot plants either. Some people collect stamps or paintings and absolutely love their collection, some people are birdwatchers and despite loving birds dearly and getting untold joy from them, they may rarely or never touch one.
So why keep elapids? For me, it's because they're fascinating and they're beautiful.
Here are some Death Adder pictures, maybe they'll convince you.
I should say, there are certainly a lot of people keeping them for the wrong reasons. Some of the motivations which lead people to elapids, (or sometimes similarly even non venomous snakes) which I think are invalid are the desire to overcome fear, trying to prove that you're 'tough' ("look at me, I'm freehandling a deadly snake, I'm such a man") or feeling that it's just expected that if you've been into snakes for a while you'll move on to elapids. I'm certainly not going to try to encourage anyone to take up elapid keeping or handling, but there are good reasons for some people to do so and if they're willing and capable of doing it safely, I think that's wonderful. I don't think there is anything more special about highly venomous elapids than Children's pythons (I keep Children's pythons too and they're some of my favourite animals), but some people like plants, some like cars, some like fish, some like pythons, some like frogs, some like elapids, etc etc etc.
