Snakes

When I was a boy we used to go to the zoo very frequently. I had always enjoyed the more glamorous entities of the zoo like the big cats, the elephant, the hippopotamus and my favourite, the rhinoceros. However, none of them intrigued me the way snakes did.

The snakes baffled me by their absence. There were glass boxes with weird-looking straw blanketish things; my parents had convinced me that the snakes stayed inside them because it was winter. This always surprised me: did Monte Carlo have outlets in Indian forests giving away snake-sized blankets for free?

Then I realised that of all animals, snakes are perhaps made to reside in areas that resemble their natural habitat the least. They don't get to shrug off their shells and hide their raw nakedness in ambiguity in a glass box with tiles as the surface. They simply want to be themselves; they need a secluded spot so that they can get rid of their shell every once in a while when the weather is at its harshest.

Then it dawned upon me how cruel we really are. If we want to keep snakes in a zoo, we should at least allow it to live like a snake, not a mannequin.