What is it?
[Editor: Leo and Medium Grey investigate a small brown snake lured out of its burrow by the sun.
[Update: Scientifically speaking, what they are annoying is a glass lizard, not a snake. It doesn’t have legs, but it does have movable eyelids and external ear openings. They are called glass lizards because their tails break off easily and regenerate – this allows them to escape from predators.]
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Established: 21 November 2004
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10 comments
Zoology… that’s a Charlie Parker tune, right? 😈
they didn’t dissect it, i hope. i love cats, but they’re [literally] death on slithery critters [whom i also have a soft spot for].
Ah yes, snakes and cats. When I was growing up I had a cat that loved bringing “gifts” to us. One day he brought in a juvenile water moccassin through the mudroom/utility room door. I still remember my mother shrieking and then using all three of my names, yelling “Get that snake out of my house, *NOW*!”. By that time the snake had escaped and slithered under the washing machine. I ended up washing all the clothes for the next week :-).
Snakes…. ewwwww… *shutters*
I updated to more correctly identify what they are messing with as a legless lizard, rather than a snake, but I do wish the cats would leave them alone as the lizards eat insects.
Been there and done that with pygmy rattlesnakes, Badtux.
If my mother hadn’t started shrieking, the cat wouldn’t have dropped the snake and skedaddled back out the door, so it was her own fault ;-).
Of course, being a kid, the next thing I did after washing clothes for a week was go out and buy a rubber snake and put it in the middle of the kitchen floor (the mudroom was on the carport side of the kitchen and had two doors, one to the back yard and one to the carport, as well as having the washer and dryer). Sure enough, there was a big shriek that evening and the three names thing and “get this snake out of my house!”. So I calmly ambled over to the “snake”, picked it up by its tail, opened up the back door, and tossed it out. Then I didn’t have to wash all the clothes anymore ;-). I still to this day have no idea what happened to the original (non-rubber) snake. When my mother moved out years later, there was no little skeleton of a snake under the washer or dryer. All I can figure is that at some point in time it came out from under the washer/dryer and the cat got it and took it back out again since obviously we weren’t welcoming its gift with the proper praise :-).
– Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin
It could have found its own way out, although they don’t move all that fast compared to most non-venomous snakes, so the cat would have got it before it hit the water and escaped.
Our cat down on the bayou didn’t share – she ate what she caught except for heads and tails. My brothers and I were the ones who would bring things that my Mother wasn’t fond of into the house.
ooooh! glass lizard! they’re way cool. the lizards are my favorite herps. turtles are cool, and snakes are cool, but lizards are downright cute, even the ugly ones. well, maybe the komodo dragons aren’t so cute.
curmudgeon cat’s favorite prey has always been too big to drag home, but all of our family cats regularly shared their bounty with us humans, mostly lizards and birds and mice, but there was the occasional small snake.
Our ones have persecuted slow worms, our one legless lizard. I wish they didn’t either
I like the geckos we get, the speckled brown ones. The look like they are wearing clown shoes when they move. I take lizards outside when I find them, as their presence in the house tends to lead to destruction when the cats notice them.
You can’t stop a cat acting like a cat, Jams. The hunting instincts serve me well in rodent control, but I wish you could restrict their activities to other mammals, especially rodentia.