The Day my Chihuahua was Eaten by a Snake

This article may be offensive to those who are serious animal lovers, serious snake haters, or those who just can't deal with death. This does involve the unintentional death of an animal, told with humor, but by an animal lover. So be duly warned.

The breed of domesticated canine rat called the Chihuahua is perhaps my least favorite species of creature. Chiggers are higher up on the list. Snakes are most definitely up there. In fact, I can honestly say, I've never met a Chihuahua that I didn't want to drop kick into a vat of boiling oil.

Max (not his real name), as a young man had the Habitrail^TM that made all the rest of us salivate. Even those of us who really didn't care about them were jealous of his set up. It was just too cool not to be envious of it. Not just a tank with a few tubes that went from the side to side and then to a bubble side on top. This thing had seemingly miles of tubes. They wrapped around his room in the basement of his house. They were suspended from the ceiling.

If you were a gerbil, or mouse, and you found yourself in this thing you would have thought you had died and gone to heaven. You could run around tube after tube to your heart's content. Until you took the tube that took you through the wall into the next room and you came face to face with the fact that the trail was merely a growing ground for the rodents Max used to feed his Boa Constrictor.

Max had had the snake for as long as any of us could remember. He had it when we were young enough that jumping the fences between the backyards was the pinnacle of fun and excitement. The snake was there when we played Dungeons and Dragons in the basement amidst the cigarette butts and the beer bottles. The snake slithered, watched, coiled, fed and grew.

Snakes start to eat small creatures such and mice. As they grow they move on to larger prey. This snake was up to several full grown chickens at a time at this telling He was so large that we converted Max's bedroom into what we affectionately called the Snake Pit. We sealed every crack and crevice that we could find and covered those we couldn't. The room only had two openings. One was the small hole through which the trail ran. The other was the entryway intended for us humans. There are penitentiaries that do not have security as tight as this room. Max was ever mindful of his other family members, and ever fearful of his mother.

The doorway was two glass doors separated by a yard long dead air space. The air vents were protected by a screen covered wire mesh that an anorexic fly would have been hard pressed to get through. The windows were sealed inside and out with Plexiglas and enough caulking the do the White House. One corner of the room was a series of "branches" we had made out of 3 in. PVC. This was the snakes' favorite place to be; curled up on the pipes, watching, waiting.

Max had a girlfriend who had moved in with him for a brief period of time. She was very cute and stylish. She also had the intelligence of road kill (not that cute and stylish women are dumb). This was evidenced no more effectively than by the fact that she owned and doted on a Chihuahua named Chi Chi.

Chi Chi was the perfect example of what the breed is like. It loved her, hated everyone and everything else. The dastardly little beast would go after anything, yipping like a soprano alarm clock that you just wanted to turn off with a sledge hammer. Max hated it. The feeling was mutual by the growing number of chewed pants legs Max was acquiring. It would even attack Max when they were having an intimate moment necessitating locking it out of the room. We all thought that a dog-a-que would be a really good idea.

It all happened as if by design. Later, we all admitted that we would have liked for it to have been planned but alas it wasn't. At least not by us mere mortals. One day we were sitting in the basement indulging in a bit of herbal entertainment. The girlfriend was gone and the itty bitty beast from the nether regions of Lucifer's anus was yipping menacingly at the snake from the safety of two panes of glass separating them. The dog barked, the snake contemplated the dog, the dog jumped against the nearest door and lo and behold it popped open. Being in our befuddled state we were not fast enough to stop the four legged terror from rushing in to the second door which, for some reason that we will never know, had not latched completely. The dog pushed against it and in it went.

Constricting snakes, when they strike, move very fast regardless of their size. The dog was wrapped, squished and swallowed in short order, collar and all. A collective "Oh my god......" and other exclamations of total surprise erupted as we stared dumbfounded at the scene.

Then, for Max, came the realization that several threads of future inevitabilities had begun with this macabre happenstance. First, he wasn't going to have to go to the pet store to get the chickens to feed the snake for a while. Bonus. Second, he wasn't going to have to protect his family jewels from small jaws of pointy, crushing, excruciating pain. Bonus again. Third, he was going to have to either lie to his girlfriend as to what had happened, making it necessary to come up with a convincing story (he couldn't just say the dog ran away because it wouldn't even go outside without knowing where she was at), or he was going to have to tell the truth and thereby, presumably, end a relationship of mostly sexual significance.

For our part, we simply toasted the thankfully departed by continuing on with the already in process imbibing.