About a Snake

Dear Supposed Friend,

I don’t care how you justify yourself, or try, theft is still theft.  Blame your husband all you want, I still find you at fault.  You could have chosen to act differently as easily as he could.  That makes you an accomplice.

Regardless of everything else you throw into the mix, here’s the situation.  I gave you my snake to take care of until after the birth.  I tried to pick up my snake before the birth, but you put me off because the snake was shedding.  You also informed me that you had put your snake in the habitat with my snake, though I thought it was a bad idea.  You are only supposed to put snakes of the same approximate size in the same habitat, but yours was significantly smaller.  You moved out of state with the snake before the birth.  You informed me after the fact that the two snakes had bred and the decision was made based on that fact.

The current situation has me at a loss and you at a gain.  I am down a snake, tank, under-the-tank heating pad, heating lamp, snake hide, extra-large, corner-fitted, water dish,  and the training time of a snake I had performed with.  This is a loss to not only myself, but also my business.  You have profited with not only all these things, but also any snakes from the breeding, so that could be anywhere from three to eleven eggs.  Provided you properly care for the hatchlings, you could stand to make quite a tidy profit off of my snake.  You could also continue to use her as breeding stock to continue to profit off of her.  As a result, it is clear who benefited from this deal.

In the end, I inform you that I would like the cost to my business returned to me.  I cannot have the training time back, but I can get back the financial loss.  I asked for the initial cost of the whole set-up and snake $250.  This is quite the bargain.  Having priced how much it would cost me to replace the set-up and an untrained snake of a smaller, but stage-worthy size, I know I underestimated by quite a bit.  The habitat set-up alone will cost a minimum of $200 to replace, about what I spent on my previous snake’s habitat.  Unfortunately, the price for a smaller snake will run approximately $80 for the same variety of snake.  For a snake the same size, provided I can find one, the price would be in the range of $100-150.  Needless to say, I was offering you a decent discount.  I would not actually be able to replace my stolen property for that rate, but I would at least have the benefit of having my previous costs covered.

In response to me, you give me your financial reasoning as to why you feel that you have already repaid the cost of the snake in services for caring for the snake.  You say I never intended to repay you for it, but you never asked me to either.  I would love to see receipts for these purchases, simply for evidence of the burden of cost my snake has presented to you.

In addition, you also sited work you did cleaning my house as part of that service.  You claim you did so much work here, when in reality, it was your room mate that did the hardest part, cleaning up the bathroom.  You and your husband did sweep up my living room and dining room, which was appreciated, but you didn’t really clean anything.  Even the dishes, I had already done most of them.  You left what dishes you didn’t finish you left in standing water without telling me.  In reality, had you been a paid cleaning service, I would have gone to the service you worked for and issued a complaint.  To top it all off, you volunteered to come help me.  Later you state that you did it because it was the right thing to do, but you hadn’t seen my house before you came over to help me clean.  It was voluntary.  Beyond that, you did it because we were friends and I asked you to.  I don’t believe that it should be counted as financial debt in any way after the fact.  Had I known you intended to have me pay for the service, as I said, I would have had reason to withhold pay until the job was done.  Further, I never would have asked for your help.  How foolish you must be to believe that you can use an act of kindness to justify your theft.

Let’s look at this logically, just on the finances of your cost from the snake and my loss.  You and I both know that there is no way you could have spent $250 on that snake if you were caring for him properly.  If it cost $250 to properly care for a snake every month, I clearly couldn’t afford to own one.  A snake the size of mine should be eating one medium rat every week to two weeks.  Even at the most expensive place I’ve found to get live food I was only able to come up with a cost of $3.50 per rat, and those were rats too big for him to eat.  That means at the most, for six weeks you would have paid $21.  You also bought new substrate for the tank.  That would have taken about two bags or one large bag, about a $20 value.  However, you could have also used newspaper, which could have been picked up from me for free.  Just for the sake of argument, I’ll give you the substrate.  You claimed you weren’t going to use the heat lamp because the room was plenty warm enough, yet you say you replaced the bulb anyway.  That’s another $10 at the most.  Thus far, this brings you to a value of $51.  I cannot possibly understand where your additional $200 in costs are coming from.  That is more than a little outrageous.  I had to wonder what details I was missing out on.  Even if you had fed the snake twice it’s average meals, that still does not bring the cost to $250 in total.  As a result of that logic, I think you would have to agree that you weren’t exactly being realistic.

Then there was the factor of your care.  I think the cost of the substrate should be taken off, or at least by half.  You put your snake in my snake’s habitat with mine.  Therefore you were getting benefit out of having my snake and it’s housing there.  You fed my snake two rats on the day you took it.  According to your husband, you also gave the snake three additional rats under the watch and advice of the owner of a local pet shop.  That’s five rats in two days.  That’s five to ten weeks worth of feedings in two days.  That’s not healthy, yet you tell me my snake was healthier with you than it had ever been with me.  You then continued to feed my snake every time it gave you "that look".  As a result, my snake was being fed a minimum of two rats every week.  For a healthy snake of my snake’s size, it should have been shedding every six to eight weeks.  In your care my snake was shedding every two weeks.  As a result of your snake being kept with mine, my snake was proven to be female and is supposedly going to be laying eggs.&n

bsp; I could have told you this would be a bad idea as I did not have confirmation of my snake’s gender.  Using the masculine was more a generic term than a gender specific one.  I have to wonder what else you may have done that wasn’t the most healthy for my snake.  I tried to tell you how I felt about this, but all I got in return was hostility because you knew what you were doing.  In everything I’ve read, researched, and spoken to owners and breeders of ball pythons, nothing about your care was healthy for my snake.

What’s more is that your husband said you went to the shop I bought the snake from to feed these additional three rats and to check the health of the snake.  I had never been to that shop, nor was the snake purchased there.  There is more than one shop in the town I bought the snake, and I bought my snake at the shop around the corner from where I teach dance.  After hearing what you’ve said about the woman at the shop you took my snake too, I will not be patronizing their shop, not even for food.  I’ve heard other unsatisfactory reviews from others about that shop since.  Yes, it’s pretty much the only place to get exotic reptiles in the area, but I don’t know that I would trust an owner that encourages feeding a snake five times it’s weekly diet in two days, even if it hasn’t eaten in a month.  My snake had eaten much more recently than that.  I simply couldn’t remember if it had been one week or two.  Given all your knowledge about reptile care seems to have come from this woman, I’m not inclined to trust your care and handling either.  I’ve known plenty of people who have owned or bred snakes, specifically ball pythons and boas.  One person would even offer out his services to help nurse sick reptiles back to health, specifically snakes that were ill due to mistreatment or neglect by their owners.  Never before have I heard of snakes being cared for the way you cared for my snake.  However, I have heard of snakes getting sick or that have died due to overeating because of treatment like yours.  Needless to say, if that’s the kind of treatment they encourage, I’m not even going to stop in there out of curiosity.  I’ll buy my snakes elsewhere.  If nothing else, there’s always PetCo.

In the end, what bothers me most is the way you expected me to feel bad for you.  You told me you were sorry and you still wanted to be friends.  You blamed it on your husband saying that it was his decision because the snake would be laying eggs.  You claimed you felt incredibly bad about the whole thing and hoped I would forgive you, yet doubted I would.  You gave me this sob story about the movers coming early and not having any time.  Then you went and blamed me for not making enough effort.  This whole mess was everyone’s fault but your own.

Let me clarify a few things for you here.  I forgive you.  I forgave you before you even contacted me, from the point I knew you had stolen my snake.  I forgave you again after you tried to pin all the blame on me and tried to tell me that we were even because you didn’t want to owe me any financial debt, yet still wanted to be friends.  I forgave you when you blatantly attacked me, and when your husband (or you on your husband’s account, which I know is a frequent occurrence) attacked me for my feelings on the matter.  I forgave both of you when you kept trying to goad me into a fight.  I will continue to forgive you.  However, I do not and will not remain friends with someone who steals with me.  I cannot accept a friendship where someone tries to justify theft through actions done in kindness and through financial claims that are simply inaccurate.  I refuse to have a friendship with someone who attacks me because they cannot accept that their actions were wrong and perhaps it would be a positive gesture to try and make reparations.  I have forgiven, but I will never allow myself to be your friend again.  Your actions have lost my friendship to you.

In the end, I know I didn’t do everything to get my snake back, so I blame myself.  I could have done more.  I should have known better than to give my snake to your keeping.  I knew from the start it would never be returned.  My only option now is to take the financial hit and start over again.  I’ve found some baby corn snakes that would raise up into lovely, beautiful dance partners.  They have wonderful and rare coloring, one with red tones on creme and the rest with white tones on creme.  They’re barely hatchlings, so they will take a good long while to raise into good dance partners, but corn snakes have a 30 or more year lifespan, so they will be my companions for quite some time.  Perhaps when I have more money I can invest in a larger snake to replace mine, one that won’t require so much time to grow into a good size for stage.  I’m going to move on in all of this.  It’s better to move on than to sulk and be stuck in the past.  I hope you enjoy my snake and the babies she brings you.  I hope the gain is worth the loss of a friendship.

~*~Raven Night~*~