Saturday, July 08, 2006

It's Saturday



And that means it's Sky time.

Perhaps I should explain a bit about my little rant yesterday. There has been a thread running these last few days on the Cornsnake forum about the worst reptile advice people were ever given. Several people on there mentioned being told to "teach" their snakes to eat fruits and vegetables because feeding them mice is cruel. One guy even tried to feed his snake lettuce and soda crackers. You couldn't even get me to eat lettuce, much less get a snake eat it!

This is eerily coincidental to an episode of Dinotopia my son watched last week. In that episode, the Dinotopians--a community of strictly vegetarian people and dinosaurs--find an egg which hatches into a baby T-Rex. In that show, carnivorous dinosaurs and portrayed as evil, mindless monsters. You can almost see the evil and hatred projecting from their computer generated visages.

Herbivorous dinosaurs, on the other hand, are portrayed as gentle, friendly, open minded, and intelligent beings living and working with on equal footing with the human members of society. They have developed complex social structures and language. One can even speak English and French.

Anyway, this baby T-Rex hatches, and the dinotopians decide they are going to "reform" it by teaching it to eat vegetables. It doesn't work, of course, and they end up releasing it back into the wild.

And this episode was eerily reminiscent of an old Land Before Time movie in which the young dinosaurs found an egg which hatched into a T-Rex. They also decided they were going to teach it to eat what they eat--vegetation.

It's been on my mind a lot lately because of this. And it just touched a nerve.

Now to go thaw out mice for the rest of my snakes...

2 comments:

Buck said...

Your rant was well-put, Becky, both in the point you made and the way you made it. Great pics, as usual, too!

Becky G said...

Thank you Buck. If people want to be vegetarians, that's fine with me. But no one force a carnivore to eat unnatural foods.