The McWetlog

I’ve since heard from the owner of the Gaboon viper that was seized in Toronto last week, who wrote to explain the situation from their point of view and their background and philosophy with respect to venomous snake keeping. I wrote back to say good luck sorting everything out, but also that I didn’t agree with keeping venomous snakes in an apartment in a large city.

Even though I think venomous snakes are very interesting, and have several friends and acquaintances who keep venomous snakes (“hot” snakes or “hots,” in herpers’ jargon), I will never keep any myself. Here are my reasons why.

1. They’re illegal. I try to stay on the right side of the law as much as possible. In Quebec, venomous snakes are illegal across the province; elsewhere in Canada, they may be subject to prohibitions at the municipal level; I can’t think of a major city that doesn’t ban them.

As a result, when people keep venomous snakes in defiance of the law, they have to be ridiculously secretive about it. They tend to be very coy about revealing their addresses or indeed the exact numbers and species they keep. They also tend to live in one of those few municipalities where venomous snakes aren’t banned, and to keep quiet about it for fear that they will be banned as soon as their presence is discovered. And they tend to socialize mostly with other venomous snake keepers, because anyone who knows what you keep and where you live is a security risk — someone who could rat you out later on if your relationship turns sour. Hanging out with people who also keep hots ensures trust in a mutually assured destruction kind of way.

If a venomous snake collection is discovered, as my correspondent found out, it’s guaranteed to get media attention. Technically, you’re in less legal trouble than if the authorities caught you with a grow op or a meth lab, but that’s not nearly as newsworthy, in a man-bites-dog sense, as someone who keeps cobras or puff adders in a small apartment. Those who claim that there’s no such thing as bad press has never found themselves tut-tutted on the national news because their saw-scaled viper got loose. And, by the way, I’ve observed that the people who tend to get into this kind of trouble do not do well with the media. (I have a media background, and even I wouldn’t be able to brazen my way out of this sort of thing.)

A substantial part of the enjoyment I get from snake-keeping is being able to share what I learn — to blog about them, to write articles, to post photos. I couldn’t do that nearly as easily if the snakes I kept were venomous. I’d certainly have to do it anonymously, or be invisible to my community. So there’s no point in doing so, from that point of view.

2. They’re fucking dangerous. I know, I know: duh. But it bears repeating and emphasizing, because I think a lot of people haven’t quite internalized just how dangerous they are. Like many exotic animals, venomous snakes can lull you into a false sense of security — by which I mean that because they don’t try to kill you at every opportunity, it’s possible for a beginning keeper to go some time before getting into trouble. You can make a mistake a dozen times before that same mistake gets you bitten (or, again to use the lingo, “tagged”). As any experienced hot keeper will tell you, it’s not a matter of if, but when. If you keep hots, you will, at some point, get bitten.

Then what? Antivenom costs thousands of dollars per vial, and it can take dozens of vials to treat a particularly nasty bite. And each vial has an expiry date, so this is an ongoing expenditure. This assumes, as well, that an effective antivenom exists for the weirdo exotic hot snake you keep: African bush vipers (Atheris), for example, have none, and antivenoms for other species aren’t necessarily effective.

You also have to own your own antivenom, because you can’t expect your local hospital to keep exotic antivenoms for snakes found halfway around the world. In Canada, the only hospitals to keep antivenom in stock are those where rattlesnakes are found; they’re meant for people who get tagged by a massasauga at the cottage, not people who had an oopsie with their pet fer-de-lance. So unless you have your own, they have to fly it in from another location, and try, in the meantime, to prevent you from dying on them. This is exciting enough with neurotoxic venom, which shuts down your autonomic systems and puts you on a ventilator; it’s a lot more fun with hemotoxic venom, which melts the flesh off your bones.

And then, when you’ve fully recovered, you discover that your health insurance, public or otherwise, doesn’t cover some or all of your medical costs (such as, for example, that $25,000 in antivenom). And that doesn’t even cover the liability you face if your snake bites someone else. (Which happens more often than you might think: “Hey, check out my viper!” NOM! “Oh, shit!”)

Me, I’m kind of averse to pain, mutilation, death, spending tens thousands of dollars on antivenom, and getting sued for every penny I own.

3. I don’t need to do it. A lot of snake keepers have this funny idea that keeping hots is something you graduate to — that keeping non-venomous snakes is only something you do for practice until you get to the main event. This is not helped by certain hot keepers who act like they’re God’s gift, lording it over the rest of us chickenshits who stick to colubrids and pythons.

Seriously, guys: you’re not helping the rest of us. Bad enough that the first question we always get is whether what we keep is poisonous. (Answer: “Of course not. We’re crazy, not stupid.”) It’s not fun having to reassure friends, landlords, building inspectors, town councillors and the like that everything we have is safe, friendly and tame — and that that’s all we’re interested in.

Honestly, we need to get over this fascination with deadly snakes simply because they are deadly. There are plenty of interesting snakes out there that not only can’t hurt you, they wouldn’t want to if they could. There are snakes out there that are the tamest animals you could ever encounter in the wild. The fact that they’re tame and safe does not make them uninteresting. But, unfortunately, the people making wildlife documentaries don’t seem to agree — and I have to admit that a snake just sitting there, hanging out, doesn’t make for great television. But you know what else makes for great television? Awesome explosions (see also: half of the Discovery Channel’s prime time programming). Thing is, I don’t necessarily want some of that in my spare bedroom. See what I mean?

If you get off on facing death, I’d rather you do something else. Get a motorcycle or something.

Now, as I said earlier, I have several friends and acquaintances who keep venomous snakes. What do I have to say about that?

I’m reassured by the fact that the hot keepers I know well are extremely responsible and careful about it — not least because any mistake they make could be terminal for them, and make things difficult for their friends. While they’d be the first to advocate a permit system like Florida’s, they self-regulate as best as they can. Experienced keepers mentor the beginners to make sure they learn the proper procedures, which include the right way to use hooks, grab sticks, restraining tubes and trap boxes, and proper caging and security (i.e., “an escape-proof cage in an escape-proof room,” as one put it).

The problem is that not everyone gets into this mentoring system. Experienced hot keepers will be the first to tell you that it’s too damn easy to get a deadly snake. A few years ago, when I was paying closer attention to such things, I knew where to go and who to talk to if I wanted to buy a cobra, mamba or bushmaster. Young hotshots who don’t want to learn from their elders, or who aren’t willing to wait, don’t have to. The mentoring system only works if the experienced hot keepers are the gatekeepers who can determine who gets access to the hots. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. It’s more democratic — who appointed these guys as arbiters of who does and doesn’t play with deadly snakes? — but it means that a lot of dolts get in over their heads.

In the absence of a permit system for venomous snake keeping that is legally enforceable, our choice is between unfettered access, mitigated somewhat by municipal ordinances, and a complete and total ban. Truth be told, there isn’t much political capital to be had in creating a permit system — there just aren’t enough people doing it. (What can I say? More people smoke pot than keep copperheads.) But enough people do it that occasionally one of them, whether they’re a n00b or someone a bit more experienced and responsible — which, to be fair, is what my correspondent sounds like — gets in the news.

Five and a half years (and two cameras) ago, I went down to Smiths Falls to watch the arrival of Canadian Pacific #2816, an H1b 4-6-4 Hudson steam locomotive built in 1930. After its restoration, CP ran it as a public relations and excursion train between 2001 and 2008; it’s been in storage since. Here, at last, are the photos from my trip to Smiths Falls on June 11, 2004, where I jostled with about a hundred other railfans as we took picture after picture of that rarity of rarities, a steam locomotive operating on a Class I main line.

(One thing I remember from that day was just how quiet a steam locomotive is: at rest, it’s basically a big kettle, pinging away. They’re much quieter than diesels.)

Here’s a raw, unprocessed, monochrome image of Prometheus, a small moon of Saturn, taken by Cassini last Wednesday; I’ve edited out some of the cosmic ray hits on the sensor. It’s today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day; the Planetary Society’s Emily Lakdawalla has been playing with some Prometheus imagery. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

In Toronto yesterday, police responding to a noise complaint found a Gaboon viper in an apartment. Here’s the twist: the viper was being kept by the person making the complaint — the cops stopped by as part of the investigation. Of course, keeping venomous snakes is illegal in Toronto, so things happened, and the snake has been surrendered to the Toronto Zoo.

Moral: if you keep illegal animals, you may want to think twice about calling the cops. Or at the very least, you might want to keep your ferociously venomous snake discreetly out of view.

At least the snake wasn’t loose, like a certain cobra three years ago.

Many people who want to get a pet snake find the idea of snake keeping a bit intimidating. This feeling isn’t helped when, as they surf the Web and read the pet manuals, they learn all the things that can go wrong with a pet snake. The health problems alone are enough to scare anyone stiff: mites and ticks, internal parasites, mouth rot. They may panic at the idea of shedding problems or wonder whether a cage is escape-proof. They worry about getting things just right: how much and how often the snake needs to be fed, the exact temperature of the cage.

If this sounds a bit neurotic, you’re probably right. The people who worry to death are the people who ask questions — so they’re the people I hear from. The people who don’t worry, the people who buy a snake without doing their homework — I don’t hear from them at all, and I don’t think very much of them either. Given a choice, I’d rather that they worry too much than not enough.

So I sometimes have to talk beginners off the ledge. The pet manuals that go into graphic detail about all the health problems a snake may face do not necessarily explain how common an occurrence these problems are. Their message is: “This may occur. If it does, here’s how to deal with it.” They do not say: “If you’re doing everything right — if you bought a healthy snake from a reliable source, and your snake is kept in a clean cage at the right temperature and you’re feeding it properly — you will almost never see this. But if it does happen, here’s how to deal with it.” A more worried or paranoid beginner may end up being deathly afraid that something extremely uncommon will happen to their snake.

Let me provide some perspective, and some idea of how rare some of this stuff is. Of the 30 snakes currently in our care, only two have ever made a trip to the vet. (Granted, some snakes I have taken to the vet have since died, and some are now in other people’s hands.) In my 14 years of snake keeping — which at one point involved more than a hundred snakes at once — I’ve never encountered mouth rot. I’ve seen the symptoms of a vitamin B deficiency only once, as a child. I’ve had to deal with roundworms on a few occasions, but they were in garter snakes that ate live fish. Twice my vet has had to deal with microbial infections: a bout of Giardia that affected a trio of corn snakes (one died, two survive), and a Strongyloides infection in a newly acquired rat snake (died). One snake (still with us) had to be taken to the vet to treat an injured nose. One snake (now in other hands) had to be taken to the vet to deal with egg binding (now that was an emergency).

We’ve had to deal with mites at least half a dozen times, and shedding problems on a regular basis — both of these, though, can be handled by any snake keeper. Helping a snake shed its skin is far easier than trimming a cat’s claws — unlike the cat, the snake is not actively fighting your efforts (if anything, a snake having shedding problems is very cooperative). Dealing with mites isn’t difficult, it’s just labour-intensive — and it’s easier if you’re sane and only keep one or two snakes; mites are only a serious pain if you have a ridiculously large snake collection (you have to wipe out all mites in all cages at the same time, or it’s no good).

Snake keeping is easy — it’s just unfamiliar. In many ways, dogs and cats are much more difficult, but people are much more familiar with their care requirements.

The problem for beginning snake keepers is that they think that keeping snakes is like cultivating orchids — as in, difficult and exacting — when in fact, with a few exceptions, it’s like cultivating cactuses. If you can’t keep an Aloe vera alive, you probably should reconsider the idea of indoor plants; if you can’t keep a corn snake alive, you’re probably not cut out for pets in general.

Fortunately, the stressed-out beginning snake keeper usually gets the hang of things after a few months. Trust me: I’ve been there too.

Patti writes to share her frustrations with Apple’s new Magic Mouse:

So, I’ve decided I hate my Magic Mouse. It’s very cool in concept, but in actual use, it falls flat on its face. It goes through batteries like crazy (I think you’d mentioned that). But the worst thing is that it seems to take only the lightest touch to send a page reeling off into no-man’s land. I’m constantly pulling my pages back where I want them and it’s driving me nuts. I can’t seem to train myself not to rest my fingertips lightly on the mouse at times and that’s all it seems to take to get the scrolling going. I think I’m going to switch (regretfully) to a standard two-button mouse with scroll wheel. I’ll lose the cool factor, but at least I won’t spend 20 percent of my time putting pages back where they belong!

Have you any further thoughts on the thing now that you’ve been using it a while longer?

In my last entry about this mouse I mentioned that I found scrolling to be crazy sensitive; I’m hoping they tone it down somewhat in a software update or at the very least allow users to control it. It’s as though Apple’s test case was scrolling through documents or photo libraries, but they didn’t check to see if it was too sensitive for other applications.

Battery life has been shorter than expected: I’m already on my third set of batteries, though I’m using ordinary brand-name alkaline batteries. I suspect I’ll have to use rechargeables. There are reports that the Magic Mouse reports its batteries as dead when there’s still a 40 percent charge, and Magic Mice have been implicated in a recently fixed firmware bug that drained the batteries on Apple wireless keyboards. Magic Mouse power management may not be ready for prime time. Again, I’m hoping for a fix.

It’s still better than Apple’s previous mouse, though. Not that that’s saying much.

Previously: More Magic Mouse observations; First impressions: Apple’s Magic Mouse.

A composite image of the four largest moons of Jupiter. From left to right: Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa. Credit: NASA/JPL/DLR.

Ganymede and Callisto are the two largest moons of Jupiter. They’re similar in size and chemical composition (half rock, half ice), and both may have subsurface oceans, but their differences — Ganymede has a differentiated core and is the only moon in the solar system with a magnetosphere — have been confounding planetologists. Researchers at the Southwest Research Institute have proposed an explanation that has to do with the Late Heavy Bombardment, approximately four billion years ago, when comets and asteroids pelted the Earth’s Moon and other terrestrial planets. When these impactors hit Ganymede and Callisto, the ice at the impact site melted. Ganymede is a lot closer to Jupiter than Callisto; according to the researchers’ model, thanks to Jupiter’s gravity, about twice as many impactors hit Ganymede than hit Callisto — and they hit a lot harder, too. The net effect is that a lot more of Ganymede’s ice turned to liquid water, and the remaining rocky materials sank and settled in the core. Neat. News coverage: Astronomy, CBC News, Universe Today.

Callisto escaped a lot of the Late Heavy Bombardment because it’s so far away from Jupiter — at about 1.9 million kilometres, it’s the most distant of Jupiter’s four major (Galilean) moons. That distance means it’s not in an orbital resonance with the other three moons (Io, Europa and Ganymede are in a 1:2:4 resonance, which means that Io completes four orbits for every two of Europa’s and one of Ganymede’s). It’s still tidally locked, though. Callisto is also far enough away that it does not receive nearly as much radiation as the other major moons. Its 0.01 rem per day is a lot more manageable than Ganymede’s 8 rem per day (nearly six times the yearly limit for radiation workers), Europa’s 540 rem per day (60 percent fatality after 30 days), or Io’s 3,600 rem per day (100 percent fatality after seven days). If human beings are going to set up a base in the Jupiter system, it’s going to be on Callisto.

The strangest example of what Matt calls “the ‘make it pink so girls like it!’ treatment” are a pair of pink O-scale train sets — a pink GG-1 and a pink steam train — from the Williams division of Bachmann Trains that we saw (and flinched at) in the latest Micro-Mark catalogue. I’m not sure what making a GG-1 pink does, other than maintain model railroading’s male and retrograde image. How long have these been in production? Decades?

The Daily Telegraph has a story about British astrophotographer Peter Shah, who’s taken some awfully good photos with amateur equipment. I don’t think the Telegraph knows much about amateur astrophotography: while Mr. Shah’s work is pretty good, comparing it to Hubble imagery is a bit much; there are plenty of astrophotographers out there doing equally good work — or better. (Mr. Shah is, on the other hand, better at promotion: he’s self-published a book of his photos. Nice!)

And calling Mr. Shah’s equipment “modest” is a bit misleading: £20,000 (about $34,000 Canadian) is well within the range of the astrophotographers’ kit I discussed in September. It’s “modest” in the way that spicy food is “medium” — i.e., it’s not synonymous with “mild”: it packs a punch, but it’s not nearly as lethal as some other stuff out there. Mr. Shah shoots with a very good astronomical CCD through an eight-inch astrograph on a Losmandy G11 mount, attached to a concrete pier in a dedicated observatory (the telescope is the cheapest part of this package). This, or something equivalent, is the most that most astrophotographers will realistically be able to aspire to. Fortunately, Mr. Shah’s example shows us that you can do very, very good work with what is good-quality, not-inexpensive but attainable equipment.

My own astrophotography rig is about one-tenth the cost of Mr. Shah’s, but with practice I should be able to do some serious work with it. I’ve been poking through a couple of astrophotography groups on Flickr, and I’ve been amazed at the results some astrophotographers have gotten with inexpensive 80mm apo doublet refractors — which bodes well for me. Short of an imaging light-pollution filter and an autoguider, I already have everything I need in terms of equipment.

On the other hand, I’ve seen some pretty mediocre work — even from people using high-end gear. Owning a 16-megapixel cooled astronomical CCD and a 24-inch Ritchey-Chrétien does not automatically make for good astrophotography, just as owning a Hasselblad or a Leica does not automatically make you a good landscape photographer. Astrophotography is not a point-and-shoot affair: there are a lot of tasks — collimation, polar alignment, accurate focusing, image processing — that take time and practice to get good at. I’m just getting started, and I figure it’ll take me years to exhaust the capabilities of my current gear.

It’s easy to focus on the equipment, but you can accomplish an awful lot with modest gear if you know what you’re doing, and the best gear won’t help you much if you don’t.

Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage — a hidden gem of a young-adult novel that won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1968. A thoughtful book that charts the development of Mia, a girl aboard a city-sized Ship that travels between backwater colony worlds, who is about to embark on her Trial — a month spent trying to survive on one of said colony worlds, whose residents barely tolerate Ship citizens. It holds up well against successors in the same genre, i.e., novels about juveniles that aren’t really juveniles, with young female protagonists, such as John Barnes’s Orbital Resonance, Joe Haldeman’s Starbound, or John Scalzi’s Zoe’s Tale. Personally, I think it compares favourably to Ender’s Game.

Panshin is a science fiction critic well-known for his work on Heinlein, including a controversial book-length study of Heinlein’s works, Heinlein in Dimension, which won a Hugo. It’s possible to think of Rite of Passage as following in the tradition of Heinlein’s juveniles — it has resonances with many of the Heinlein juveniles I’ve read, particularly Starman Jones — but, as Panshin recounts in his essay, Rite of Passage and Robert Heinlein, Rite of Passage was a reaction to Heinlein, not a pastiche of him.

I wanted to write a science fiction story that would use everything I’d learned about SF storytelling from Robert Heinlein to present a situation of relative power in which I could imagine Heinlein supporting an abuse of strength taken as a matter of right and privilege, but my character, because of the events of the story, would not.

As it turns out, Panshin was reacting to the shift in Heinlein’s attitude that came between Have Spacesuit — Will Travel and Starship Troopers — that latter book having generated more award-winning responses than any other novel in the field (see also Haldeman’s Forever War). The result is a deeply moral book that explicitly rejects Heinlein’s might-makes-right attitude.

You should also read Jo Walton’s entry on Rite of Passage.

Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin

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