Penny and I have had some funny characters come through the door as customers when we worked retail.
We had the perpetual lookers
The screaming children
The adults that needed adults
The diamonds in the rough
The solid golds
And then…
…Lurch and Selma.
I’ll let popular culture describe these two for me. Think The Addams Family meets The Simpsons. And these two knew everything about every single animal species to ever exist. Ever.
Over our 3-year professional relationship with these two characters, we only ever felt comfortable selling them a single animal and that was a small invertebrate species. We spent our time advising them on their small menagerie, dietary, supplementary, heating systems, UV lighting, appropriate substrates and anything else we do to help the animals in their care.
One September morning, in waddled Lurch and Selma with a box. They demanded that Penny and I take the box home as we “rescue the disabled ones”. Obviously confused but unable to say no to a rescue, I opened the box and Penny took the questions. After a quick examination, we were looking at a slim Palmetto corn snake. Small enough that I'd initially guessed he was only a few months old.
After Penny had taken the history, she wandered over with a look that immediately told me something wasn't quite right.
"Bought at five weeks old," she said. "Fed one pinkie every Wednesday."
She paused.
"He's nearly fourteen months old."
My jaw very nearly hit the floor.
At fourteen months old, I would have expected a corn snake somewhere around two to three feet in length. Pally (as he became known) measured barely fifteen inches. Whether his size was entirely the result of being fed a single pinkie every Wednesday, I couldn't say with certainty. But it was difficult to ignore the possibility.
After we got Pally home and settled into his vivarium, I made what turned out to be a rather foolish mistake. I'd forgotten to fill his water bowl.
As I reached in to put it right, my hand came back out with a very small corn snake firmly attached to it.
This wasn't a defensive nip.
He struck, held on and immediately attempted to constrict my hand.
I'm a fairly big chap with fairly big hands.
That little snake was either incredibly optimistic...
...or desperately hungry.
We resisted the temptation to feed him immediately, giving Pally another day to settle into his new surroundings and, hopefully, get the "zoomies" out of his system. The last thing we wanted was an overenthusiastic little snake making himself regurgitate because he was too busy exploring his new home.
The following day, it was time.
Rather than another pinkie, we offered Pally a mouse hopper—around seven grams of mousey goodness and roughly three times larger than anything he'd eaten during the previous year.
He absolutely lost his mind.
Pally struck with such enthusiasm that he immediately wrapped the hopper in a series of determined coils, rolling himself around the floor of the vivarium in the process. It was, without question, the most committed attempt at constricting a defrosted rodent I've ever witnessed.
Watching this tiny snake wrestling with a meal that was never going to fight back, Penny and I looked at each other and quietly smiled.
I think we both realised...
Pally was going to be just fine.
From that point onwards, rehabilitation became wonderfully uneventful. Appropriate prey items were introduced every ten days, giving his digestive system time to adapt while providing the nutrition he'd been missing for so long. Pally approached rehabilitation with the same enthusiasm he'd shown my hand. Every meal disappeared without hesitation, sheds arrived every two to three weeks and, slowly but surely, the little Palmetto began to grow.
And grow he did.
Over the following months he lengthened, filled out and developed the muscle tone you'd expect from a healthy young corn snake. By the time he'd reached almost twenty-eight inches in length, one final surprise was waiting for us.
Pally...
...was almost certainly a girl.
Never a bad thing.
Two years later, Pally—or rather Palli, as we've now learnt to spell it—is a very different snake.
She's just over 42 inches long, weighs a healthy 400 grams and, as far as Penny and I can tell, is thoroughly enjoying life. She climbs, burrows, hides and stalks anything remotely edible. She still sits in her water bowl whenever the mood takes her and, despite now knowing exactly where her next meal is coming from, still throws herself into feeding with the same wonderfully over-the-top enthusiasm.
She also...
...still spins.
Some habits, it seems, are worth keeping.
Next year, we're hoping to breed her for the first time, now that she's reached a healthy adult size and condition. I can't help wondering what her offspring will be like. Will they inherit her absolute commitment to food? Or was that behaviour simply the product of a difficult start in life?
I honestly don't know.
But perhaps that's the point.
Palli's story was never really about feeding pinkies.
It was about opportunity.
Nobody can say with certainty how large she might have become had she been fed appropriately from the beginning. Equally, we'll never know whether her enthusiastic feeding response is written into her genes or shaped by fourteen months of always wanting just a little bit more.
What I do know is this.
Given the chance...
She simply became the snake she'd always had the potential to be.
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