Snakes get a bad rap from B-grade movies and ones put in position where they have to defend themselves.
A few are aggressive, but most prefer to be left alone to find an occasional rat or mouse for dinner and avoid, through hibernation, temperatures too severe for their cold-blooded bodies.
John and Karen McClary keep five — three African ball pythons and two South American boa constrictors — in their south-Iola home, and are eager to speak in defense of having snakes for pets.
Consider: They eat a couple of times a month — a frozen rat thawed to their taste — and are as tickled as pigs in mud if their aquariums are kept warm and they have water 24/7. High, clammy humidity is their preference.
Easy maintenance is a top-tier recommendation for a snake as a pet. “We can take off for two or three weeks and have someone come by a time or two to make sure they have water, the (heat) registers are on, feed them once, and we don’t have a worry,” John said.
Pythons and boas look similar, are non-poisonous and belong to the same suborder, serpentes. In the wild they’re found in tropical and subtropical areas. Hibernation isn’t as demonstrative as that of local reptiles, such as black and bull snakes that retire to a basement or someplace underground when cold weather sets in.
The McClary group hibernates after a fashion, though, as their metabolisms slow and they become lethargic for a few months in winter months.
THE McCLARYS venture as snake fanciers had its genesis when he was a child in the Philippines.
His father, Andrew, was a Coast Guard officer stationed at Manila when he met and married Lucy, a local girl. The first nine years of John’s life was in the Philippines.
“It was a cool place to live,”John said, with a nanny to meet his daily needs and the sea and all sorts of other interesting natural features to pique his interest, even snow, which he saw for the first time on a mountainous island.
His mother, knowing the preponderance of cobras and other tropical snakes with ugly reputations, was cautious about where young John played, but he still found his way to a nearby field covered in head-high grass — and the home of snakes.
HIs father had a phobia about snakes, from his younger days in Ohio, where rattlesnakes and cottonmouths were common. Dad also remembered a youngster who died from a cobra bite in a Filipino village.
As with magnets that repel each other, young John developed a passion for snakes, “maybe because my parents were petrified of snakes and, like a lot of kids, I couldn’t have (a snake) so I wanted one,” John said.
John’s interest in snakes grew as he did.
