The main reason, according to snake experts, is that snakes begin swallowing their prey at the head and with humans, the snake is confronted
with a major obstacle when it gets to the shoulders.
Snakes can ingest remarkably large creatures, but need a more gradual contour to do it.
marge
On the contrary marge, I think that explanation itself is myth, I have watched a very large retic eat a deer of some kind with huge straight horns,
nothing contoured about that.
Shoulders would be no problem at all, they can eat crocodiles too. Consider if you will, they manage to swallow
something the girth of a wild pig, this means there gape is sufficiently wide. A snakes lower jow is two parts which open sideways, the snake first
dislocates the jaw at the hinges then gapes as wide as possible before mouthing the prey.
Then it uses sidewise motions to walk its jaws over the prey one side forward then the other, then the other, like so. its teeth curve rearward to
grip. its mouth expands to accomodate the prey. Now imagine if one can walk its jaws over 50cm straight horns with no problems at all, how then would
human shoulders, nice and smooth and flexible arms bending backward pose an obstacle?
Also they dont "always" eat prey head first, its the best and quickest way, but a hungry snake will sometimes eat either end even if it takes
longer.
I wanna say those pictures were proven fake on some website I ran across....
I fail to see how exactly you can debunk it, might make for intresting reading, it was probly snopes.com, they debunk everything.
And my husbands wants to know why he acn't have a pet snake .... Snakes aren't pets, and I liek my cats ... I don't want to come home and
find that the snake got out and won't need to eat for a good couple of months. LOL ....
zerinity
LMAO, atleast you have a sense of humor, even if you wear the pants
Snakes are great pets but big ones like that require care and more than one person to handle, common sense or rather lack of it account for most
constriction deaths by big pythons.
C'mon, let him have a small one then
I might just point out a freind of mine whos a curater at one of our famous zoo's, said he remembers the same pic on a calender 20 odd years ago, so
its not new in any case, be interesting to see if there was any paper news about it (no internet 20 years ago)
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