Flawed defense mechanisms

I’ve been scared of snakes in the past, so I went into this event thinking that I would be facing my fears. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I’m not really frightened anymore. Of course I was still wary of the snake that was almost as big as me, but I was fine with the average sized snakes. I even held a cute little hog-nosed snake. And I learned some fun facts. Apparently when hog-nosed snakes are scared, they puff up and flatten out their heads so they look more like a cobra. Then they hiss at you and immediately after fall backward and pretend to be dead. I don’t think that it’s the greatest defense mechanism. I mean they literally try to be scary and don’t ever wait to see if it worked. They just immediately bail and try to play dead. Still, a they’re very cute snakes that are a lot of fun to hold (unless they decide to regurgitate on you). I don’t think I’ll end up playing with snakes much in the future, but I do think they’re a lot more interesting than I did before.

One thought on “Flawed defense mechanisms

  1. Hog-nosed snakes sound so cute!! (but also – what are they thinking?) To be fair, if I encountered a hog-nosed snake in the wild and it tried that out on me, I’d probably be gone before it even got to the “play-dead” part.