Will Cuppy Tonight: "Own Your Own Snake" (from "How to Become Extinct")

"Herpetologists are people who know all about snakes and other reptiles, also amphibians. They are like other people, except that they are herpetologists. . . .

"It was one of [Darwin's] main ideas, you know, that the males of almost all animals have stronger passions than the females. Since then we've learned a thing or two. At any rate, the female snake is right there when spring arrives in the woods. . . .

"In closing, I have a little message which I wish you'd relay to some of those people who won't read a snake article because it gives them the jumps: There are no snakes in Iceland, Ireland, or New Zealand. And no snake articles."

-- Will Cuppy, in "Own Your Own Snake"

To any readers who are squeamish (or worse) about snakes, let me say that you're most unlikely to be squeamisher (or worser) about them than I am. I hesitated before including this piece, especially with the illustrations, unthreatening though they are. But I decided that: (1) If I could handle it, at least in theory anyone should be able to (it is, after all, quite respectful of the sensibilities of the snake-resistant among us), and (2) more important, it sets up a sensational sequel piece, "Aristotle, Indeed!," which we have on tap for tomorrow. -- Ken

Drawings by William Steig

OWN YOUR OWN SNAKE

(from How to Become Extinct)

Snakes are vertebrates and the vertebrates are classified as higher animals, whether you like it or not. I mean you can be a higher animal and still be a snake. This seems a rather peculiar arrangement, to be sure. If you can think of a better, let's have it.

Snakes affect different persons in different ways. Some loathe snakes so much that they won't even read about them -- and you ought to know some of these people! Others actually love snakes. Which brings us rather neatly to the first main subject or theme of this article: the snake as something to love. (I see the weakness of this theme as well as you do. The snake is not something to love.)

Do you know how many people in this country keep snakes as pets? I thought not. Even more people, of course, do nothing of the sort, and most of these would condemn the practice as morbid or worse. Frankly, considering what some of them do pet, I don't see why they should draw the line at snakes.

My own attitude is pretty tolerant. I don't care what people do about anything, let alone what they do about snakes. I may add that in my own case the problem of loving a snake or not loving a snake has never come up. I may be the type that just doesn't care to have a houseful of snakes for my very own. If I were crazy about snakes, I'd have some, wouldn't I? Or maybe I haven't met the right snake.

There are many arguments, none of them awfully good, for having a snake in the house. There's the familiar one that a snake is better than nothing. Well, that hasn't a leg to stand on, if my experience with a certain pet -- a non-snake -- is any criterion. Never take up with an animal that is merely better than nothing. Some day you may thank me for this tip.

I'd like to give a little advice to those who keep poisonous serpents around, but life has taught me that such people do not take advice. I had that out with a lady correspondent who used to write me about her pet Rattlesnakes and other diabolical species. Every time she got a new Fer-de-Lance or a Bushmaster, she would write and tell me what a darling the fellow was, knowing only too well that I wouldn't sleep a wink that night. She knew I would sit up and answer her letter, urging her to be more careful with the deadlier varieties.

One of this lady's contentions was that snakes are fundamentally friendly creatures, seeking only to be pals with those whom Fate has cast in their way. Snakes do not want to bite you, she said, they much prefer not to bite you. She was so tiresome on this point that I watched for a chance to get even, and finally it came. One of her letters contained the statement, "Snakes never bite unless they are frightened." I immediately sent her the following note: "All right, then, snakes never bite unless they are frightened." Brief but to the point, eh?

I lost track of the lady a couple of years ago, so I can't give you her latest opinions. Perhaps she got tired of my constant warnings. Her last letter, though, was as long and chatty as ever, all about the gigantic King Cobra she had acquired from the jungles of Malaysia. He was a perfect dear, she said, and just loved to be chucked under the chin with the petting stick. (The petting stick is a stick padded at the end, with which snake lovers stroke and tickle the objects of their affection, mostly from a safe distance. And how would you like it?) The very next day, I recall, she was going to enter the King Cobra's cage and give it a good tidying up.

Among the harmless ophidians, the Gopher Snake is a favorite pet with many. It grows as long as nine feet and it hisses loudly most of the time, but you could get used to that. This snake is just what you want if you suffer from Pocket Gophers, as a great many people do, surprising as it may seem in this day and age. How little we know about the lives of our own fellow creatures, when you come right down to it. But, my God, Pocket Gophers!

"Do snakes make intelligent pets?" and "How intelligent is a snake?" are questions I am often asked, sometimes by people you wouldn't expect to bring up the subject. I generally tell them how the big Boa at the London Zoological Gardens swallowed her blanket, first constricting or squeezing it in the approved manner, apparently in the belief that it was a live goat. This little anecdote invariably disappoints all who hear it. They seem to think it should be longer, or funnier. Why is it that people don't see the significance of things any more? Is it a trend?

Some snakes are intelligent enough, if you don't expect much. Others aren't. I hesitate to speak of Butler's Garter Snake in this connection, for even the simplest statistic about it sounds insulting. Its head is only five-sixteenths of an inch wide, or about half what a Garter Snake's head should be. It is pretty clear that nothing of any importance could happen in such a head; though, for all I know, they may think they're frightfully clever. Butler's Garter Snake gets by, that's about all you can say.

Butler's Garter Snake inhabits Ohio and Indiana, also parts of Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska. Observers who report it from western New York and Pennsylvania are probably Middle Westerners trying to be nasty. A related species is the Narrow-headed Garter Snake of California, a state in which several kinds of reptiles are noted for their limited cranial capacity. Scientists do not know why this condition should exist in only one particular region, but I know. Mother Nature just thought more head would be a waste of material.

Here is the place, by the way, to mention those herpetologists who specialize in Garter Snakes. Herpetologists are people who know all about snakes and other reptiles, also amphibians. They are like other people, except that they are herpetologists. By counting the dorsal scales and the labial, ventral and subcaudal scutes, studying the stripes, and measuring the tails of thousands and thousands of Garter Snakes, they have succeeded in dividing the little fellows into a number of species and subspecies; more, to be candid, than actually exist. For each new species he discovers, the herpetologist receives a bonus. Would that explain it?

Yet herpetologists have their place in the scheme of things. Because of them, we know that Butler's Garter Snake has, in most instances, only six supralabials, a state of affairs caused by the fusion of the penultimate and antepenultimate scutes. We who take our Garter Snakes so lightly may well give a thought to the herpetologists counting scutes on the genus Thamnophis in museum basements while we are out living our lives. Most of the specimens are pickled.

No article entitled "Own Your Own Snake" would be complete without a glance at Aristotle, with whom I have been conducting a feud on problems of natural history for some years now. And so far the odds are in my favor, if I do say it. I ask little credit for my victories over the Father of Learning, as they call him. They're too easy. Every time I look up something in his works, darned if the old boy isn't screwy. I suppose the rest of his stuff is fine. I just happened to look at the worst places.

Take the snake's tongue, perhaps the most controversial subject in herpetology. What says the old Stagirite? (That's what he was, you know.) Turn to Line 5, Section 660a, of De Partibus Animalium (Oxford, 1912), and read that this organ "is forked and has a fine and hairlike extremity, because of their [serpents'] great liking for dainty food. For by this arrangement they derive a twofold pleasure from savours, their gustatory sensation being as it were doubled."

Well, that's the way it goes in this business. You save up a reference for years in order to convict a rival of feeble-mindedness out of his own mouth, and when you come to use it, the thing has evaporated somehow. I would have sworn that was the silliest quotation I ever saw in my life, and I've seen plenty.

Aristotle's view of the snake's tongue, somewhat in eclipse during the Dark Ages, when people had no time for such foolishness, came to the fore again with the Revival of Letters and held first place in the schools until shortly before the Repeal of the Corn Laws. During that entire period, as today, there was a strong popular suspicion that the snake bites, or stings, with the tongue, squirting the venom through the flickering filaments and injecting it in some unknown manner with the same instrument, though where that would leave the teeth and fangs it would be hard to say. The last scientist of any eminence to support this view was a Dr. W. Holt Yates, M.R.C.P., President of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh, and author of a History of Egypt. Nobody, including his immediate family, took Dr. Yates very seriously.

We of the Lost Generation were taught that the snake hears, as well as feels, with the tongue. It sounded silly, but we took it, doped as we all were by World War I, or were we just naturally dopes? As we rush to press, the latest snake book tells us that snakes do not hear with the tongue at all -- they smell with it, for Godsakes. A snake can smell with its nose if it wants to. It can also smell by darting out its tongue and then sticking it up into its Jacobson's organ in the roof of its mouth. Working frantically back to the fountain-head, I find that Dr. Ditmars himself, in his Snakes of the World, says the snake's tongue enables it "to detect vibrations and to instantaneously 'taste' various odors either in the air or on the ground." Are you still with us?

Do you see what this makes me, when I practically called Aristotle a halfwit for saying that snakes smell with their tongues? Do you get the full force of it? Let this be a lesson to all authors who are trying to prove something. Don't make up your piece as you go along, trusting that your authorities will say what you thought they would say. First get your facts, and then write your piece, if write you must. As for Aristotle, I'll get him the next time. Father of Learning, my eye!

But speaking of sex, pet snakes are disappointing. They are not in the mood, apparently. Snakes are at their best in a wild state, where conditions are free and easy, to say the least. As Darwin puts it in The Descent of Man, "Male snakes, though appearing so sluggish, are amorous." Isn't that just like Darwin? It was one of his main ideas, you know, that the males of almost all animals have stronger passions than the females. Since then we've learned a thing or two. At any rate, the female snake is right there when spring arrives in the woods.

The social life of the snake, I fear, is not all that might be desired. Dr. Ditmars, who is no alarmist, says that Rattlesnakes, Copperheads, and Blacksnakes mate as soon as they emerge from their dens in May, even before they take a bite of food, which shows only too plainly which way their minds run. Snakes are born in summer, and it is believed that most of them mate during their second or third spring, that is, at the age of a year and a half or two years and a half. They figure they're only young once.

You have to follow a snake around before you know it. DeKay's Snake always struck me as a quiet and well-behaved sort until I learned some of its habits. It mates at the age of eighteen months. You'd expect that of the Striped Swamp Snake, but hardly of DeKay's. And I suppose there's no use trying to hush up John's Sea Snake, which mates when only six months old. At that age both the male and the female John's Sea Snake are sexually mature, and I don't mean maybe.

Snakes, in a word, are well worth knowing, unless you'd rather know something else. In closing, I have a little message which I wish you'd relay to some of those people who won't read a snake article because it gives them the jumps: There are no snakes in Iceland, Ireland, or New Zealand. And no snake articles.


TOMORROW in WILL CUPPY TONIGHT: "Aristotle, Indeed!" (from How to Become Extinct)


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY TONIGHT and WILL CUPPY TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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