The Snake Corpse Bubble has finally burst: it seems the glory days of snake-corpse-stockpiling is over, at least in California.
A Newport Beach grade school teacher who bred snakes as a hobby was arrested Wednesday on animal cruelty charges after authorities discovered more than 400 ball pythons — some alive, many dead — scattered throughout his cluttered home.
William Buchman, a sixth-grade teacher at Mariners Elementary School, is identified on various reptile collector websites as a ball python breeder who was using a process known as morphing to achieve different patterns on the snakes.
But at some point, Buchman appears to have gone from a hobbyist to a hoarder, Berg said.
Can you — no, it’s stupid, it’s too much to ask, you’ve already done so much — can you tie this in to the legend of the ghost rat ship, somehow?
Last year, Buchman, a Baltimore Ravens fan who lived alone, came over to watch the Super Bowl with neighbors, said Forest Long III, 18. But the snake breeder seemed to become reclusive after that.
He said a white van would sometimes pull up and deliver cages packed with mice.
Animal control officers visited the home about a year ago, but didn’t observe any of the conditions they saw Wednesday. Reports from neighbors prompted further investigation.
Buchman, they said, started to leave his car at a nearby park and walk home to avoid investigators.
Wearing gas masks and holding Tasers, investigators discovered 404 nonvenomous snakes — more than half of them dead — in clear plastic containers with labels reading “pastel reaper,” “cinny ghost” and “orange belly.” Authorities said nearly 50 rats and mice roamed freely inside the home.
“I got rats everywhere,” one officer said in a police video that shows investigators entering the home.
If, after all this, you still believe the “official story” that the ghost rat ship has sunk, then I feel sorry for you.
ONE IS TOO MANY. wow that title wow gotta go
ALSO: My freshman year of college, we went to this rural-ass camp in South Carolina for spring training for rowing, and a coach from a rival team ACCIDENTALLY PACKED A RATTLESNAKE in his luggage and it BIT HIM WHEN HE UNPACKED.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!
How do you accidentally pack a rattlesnake? Am I at risk for accidental rattlesnake packing?
That’s right.
A friend of mine’s roommate breeds snakes, and now their basement is just plastic drawers full of snakes. I never want to go to their house again.
Wait, alive or dead ones? Because I was trying to understand from that article whether the snakes in the “plastic containers” were dead before they were put in there, or..?
Oh they’re all alive. Just slithering away in their drawers, waiting for someone to forget to lock the basement door so they can strike…
whyyyyyyyyy
NOPE.
I have a friend who acquired one pet snake, and I never visited his home again. One snake is too many snakes.
THE SNAKE HORDE WAS OUR ONLY RECOURSE AGAINST THE CANNIBAL RAT SHIP OUR NEGLIGENCE HAS DOOMED US
OR WAIT did the snakes have to be sacrificed so they could battle the ghost rats IN THE SPIRIT WORLD
LOLing.
This needs to be a movie STAT.
we’re not even safe from the cannibal rat ghost ship on the astral plane?? oh come ON
This man was a hero preparing us for the worst. Now we have nothing and the Ghost Rat Ship shall be our demise.
Unless it bumps up on that Japanese Cat Island, in which case, it will be a battle for the ages.
oh man I hope this wasn’t just a case of neglect, I hope the rats and mice forged a mighty alliance and wreaked a terrible vengeance on those snakes. devour the devourer and all. I like snakes fine but come on. Next step is they eat that guy.
Last semester, my favorite student asked “For the animal presentation, can I bring in some of my snakes?” and since I was fielding the requests of five other students and his request wasn’t “Can I not do that assignment?” or “Can I have more points on the last test?” I automatically said yes. Ten minutes later, I was seized with regret.
“Can I bring in some of my snakes?” is one of those statements that’s a rabbit hole to an entirely different life.
Anyways he brought in six snakes in six sacks and started passing loose snakes to everyone willy-nilly. I held a meter-long ball python for the better part of an hour while he talked about snake evolution, and it was DELIGHTFUL and everyone had lots of fun and no one got bitten and several people learned that snakes were nice to pet and not scary.
tl:dr Those poor snakes!
How many snakes total, would you say, does this student possess? If “some” = 6…*shivers*
Fourteen. And some centipedes. And probably a lizard or two.
Se, I was okay through all the snakes part (for a limited meaning of okay that encompasses “feeling anxious but ashamed of my own irrational feelings” and then you said “centipedes” and I yelped out “NO!” to an empty room.
So there is a part of Doctor No (the novel) in which the Bad Guys put a giant killer centipede in James Bond’s bed, and he has to stay still as it crawls up his body.
Then, when it finally crawls off his head and onto the pillow, he throws the pillow on the ground and kills it with his shoe. And…”it burst open, yellowly.”
And that is what I always think of now when I think of centipedes. And now you will too. You’re welcome.
I remember reading that at far too young an age, but I had also recently read Roald Dahl’s Poison (obviously, far too young for that as well) and I conflated the krait from Poison with the centipede from Dr. No, and apparently that confusion cancelled out all my terror…
…so it turns out that blessedly NOPE I WILL NOT THINK OF THAT DON’T CARE NOPE.
Every time something like this comes up on The Toast, I think, how can it be that one website so perfectly catalogues the various weird chapters to my life. Dear fellow-Toasties: I know the internet says to “Say yes” and expand your horizons, but the internet is wrong about many things, and I have to say, this is one of those things.
I would know because I lived with twenty-three constrictor snakes for a period of time, including seventeen live young which were maintained in cake trays, bred optimistically for good temperament, which turned out to be a relative thing. When you retain so many constrictors for the vibrant exotics exchanges, it becomes more economically viable to simply breed your own rats to feed them, rather than purchasing same. This in turn leads to ethical debates regarding pets being fed to other pets, and later, to therapy.
The therapy has also to do with falling asleep upon a couch and waking to a ball python attempting, non-euphemistically, to inhabit a leg of your warm trousers. She had been missing for some weeks.
So, now you know, Toasties. Just say no. Say no to witches, to snakes, to rat breeding programs, to art school. Just say no. You do not need broad horizons. You need a happy, trouser-snake-free life.
I have never been so content with my narrow horizons.
Oh god oh god. I actually am pretty cool with snakes, but as pets they seem far too wily. A former boss of mine came home one day to a large snake curled up in her kitchen sink. Turns out it was the pet of the former renters, who lost it (in the walls/plumbing/WHEREVER SNAKES GO) before they moved. ahhhhHHHhhh
You’d think they would disclose that upon move-in! “By the by, the former tenant lost a snake in this apartment and never found it. Sleep well!”
“So, now you know, Toasties. Just say no. Say no to witches, to snakes, to rat breeding programs, to art school. Just say no. You do not need broad horizons. You need a happy, trouser-snake-free life.”
This is maybe one of my favourite comments ever now.
This is now my go-to advice to people considering art school.
“You need a happy, trouser-snake-free life” also goes perfectly with The Toast’s resident misandry stance.
Something something trouser snakes, heehee okay I’m done
i feel like the toast will become that place where urban legends are born AND I LOVE IT WITH ALL MY FUCKING HEART. BREED, NIGHTMARES, BREED
You realize this disclosure is your cue to change your username to literaltrousersnake, right?
I SORT OF LIKE SNAKES DON’T JUDGE ME
I live near a park and all these little garden snakes just like to chill on top of my composter in the summer! THEY’RE SUNBATHING IT’S CUTE
Snakes are awesome and also if you try to hand me one, even after asking clearly and receiving an enthusiastic “yeah!,” I will recoil a little bit. I’d really like to get past that ingrained reaction because, as I may have mentioned, snakes are awesome.
Oh, me too. My daughter had a pet Texas Rat Snake for a while, and whenever we had to take it out, I had to give myself a pep talk. “C’mon Jay, he’s fine. If you freak out, he’ll freak out, so stay calm, just stay calm.”
I was never so proud as when a baby garter snake took up residence in my garden. Look! My garden supports liiife. Also, if you live in an area where rodents want to come live in your house, having a yard bull snake is great.
I <3 snakes. People, like the snake starving asshole above, less and less every day.
They are great! Really the only problem I have with them is feeding them. If they didn’t eat mice (dead or alive) than I would have one maybe. But I am not feeding one animal-shaped-animal to another animal.
When I was a kid I had a pet garter snake that ate live goldfish! He had a little pond in his cage that we would dump the fish in and he would swim around in it and catch the fish. Still animals eating animals but they’re both scaly so it felt less awful?
I’ve always really liked snakes, although I don’t think I’d want them for a pet. Somewhere, there is a picture of 5 year old Miles of Mountains happily holding a giant python at summer camp. His name was Monty and he was pretty cute.
I have considered getting a snake as a pet but I am concerned with having to feed them mice and rats, since I also like mice and rats and would probably cry every time I fed them.
My friend’s dad has a tiny snake, and it eats frozen baby mice (the gross pink things). You sort of have to shake the mouse around so the snake thinks it’s alive, and will “hunt” it. Watching it eat was pretty cool.
Grass snakes are so lovely. When I was a little girl one of my best possessions was a sloughed-off grass snake skin.
ETA: English grass snakes, I mean.
Wait, so what I’m getting from this is that she was trying to breed for a shiny, right?
(I’m sorry. Those poor snakes. I am not unsympathetic to their plight. But that definitely sounds like the Masuda Method to me.)
Can this please be a safe space for me to just unleash my phobia of these creatures? There’s a reason Satan took the form of one in the Bible.
I don’t know why I clicked on this. It had a picture of a snake and everything. My face is stuck in a permanent frown for the rest of the day (possibly the rest of my life).
He said a white van would sometimes pull up and deliver cages packed with mice.
CAGES PACKED WITH MICE NOTHING TO SEE HERE CITIZENS
I can’t stop laughing at this.
I mean they’re useful ecologically and all, but personally I’m just not a fan. They do their thing; I do mine. That’s the extent of my relating to snakes.
Pet snakes are one thing, they’re generally non-venomous and contained (not that I would ever have one), but snakes in the wild, NOPE NOPE NOPE.
The problem is, in Australia, the snake you see in the wild is pretty likely to be able to kill you in 15 minutes flat, so I have a sensible amount of terror of wild snakes. You have to keep your guard up, they could be sneaking around in your suburb just waiting to get you *shudder*
Are there any animals in Australia that can’t kill you in 15 minutes or less?
Some of the sheep.
The best part is when you learnt of the plants that can kill you in 15 minutes of less. Or the ones that leave you writhing in unfathomable pain for up to a month because you had the gall to gently brush against them. Or the ones that everyone thinks are extinct until they’re stumbled upon by hikers.
Oh, see, I’m totally ok with snakes in their natural, outdoor environment, but pet snakes (esp. when one has snakeS plural) give me the heebie jeebies. Though if I lived in the land of Everything Here Wants You Dead, I might think differently.
I listened to the “How Did This Get Made” podcast episode about Anaconda yesterday, so this fits right in.
I just rewatched that season 3 Justified episode last night where one of Boyd’s henchmen gets bit in the face by a rattlesnake in the tent preacher’s snake pit and NOPE. NOPE NOPE nope.
I’m usually not that guy, but I have to say that this story made me really sad. I think I’ve had a rough day.
As much as I don’t enjoy larger snakes and anywhere but outside as well, he idea of this whole plastic drawer business is really horrid.
I know! My main feeling right now is “aww, poor snakes.”
Me, too. Starving and/or neglected animals of ANY classification depresses me greatly. Also, snakes are pretty cool, especially the garter snakes that live in my overgrown garden; I look forward to them every year.
It is terribly sad. All those poor creatures trapped with someone incapable or unwilling to take even the most rudimentary care of them.
Me too. I like snakes – I wouldn’t have any more, I found them very dull as pets, but they don’t deserve this.
Mr. Unshored’s saddest ever moment of work email was when he opened a message with the subject [he thought] FREE SNACKS! only to discover that it was in fact FREE SNAKES! (a colleague was moving and trying to re-home their pet snakes)
ahahahaha HEY EVERYBODY FREE SNAKES IN THE BREAK ROOM
oh my god that is just too funny!
And now I’m dead from CACKLING. BAHAHAHAHA!
Thank you, Mallory. California is now ruined forever for me. Where is the ‘Back’ button on my brain browser?!
OH NO I just put it together: cannibal rat ship, house of snakes… Someone somewhere has fallen prey to the escalating-predation model of population control.
In the coming weeks, we’re going to see a lot of news stories about structures full of higher and higher orders of predators: a movie theater full of mongooses, an amusement park teeming with hawks, a stadium overrun with coyotes.
We used to have snakes when I was younger. I used to sleep with Alice (named after Alice Cooper to cover both basses as snake-sexing is not enormously simple) in my room in her vivarium as I was the only one who didn’t mind sleeping with a light on and my sister didn’t want her in the lounge. She used to get out quite regularly and come and sleep in bed with me as it was warmer.
Once, she got out and we found her three days later when mum finally picked up her jeans that had been screwed up on the floor for three days where she’d stepped out of them.
Successful IUD insertion! WOOOOO!
Also, Minneapolis Toasties, let’s hang out. Hopefully someday with Mallory and Nicole, but we can get started on our own too.
Join the fb group here!
I really, really love this comment being on the snake thread. 🙂
Yeah, that was definitely supposed to go in the Open Thread. Oops!
I’m guessing this is just a case of “oops wrong thread” but I find it both hilarious and horrifying that your posting about iud insertion on the snake post.
I really, really love this comment being on the snake thread. 🙂
Yeah, that was definitely supposed to go in the Open Thread. Oops!
But what if I need them 🙁
But what if I need them 🙁
My worst snake nightmare as a parent, reading this gave me heebee jeebies for days-
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/21/kyle-cum…