Connor’s and Noah’s patio art 2013
There are no words to express the pain that comes along with such awful news. They were innocent little boys and certainly didn’t deserve to have their lives cut short in such a tragic way.
The mom, Mandy, is my daughter Leigha’s best friend. An amazing single mom who gave all that she could to these little boys. The snake owner, JC, is a nice man who kept these reptiles as a zoo and then part of the building was used as a pet shop.
My one and only thought when I first saw the huge snake was that it shouldn’t live where it did. That was about a year or more ago. The enclosure, deemed as safe by the owners I assume, was a special room and the animal was kept under key. It’s not just that living with such a big reptile may be creepy, it’s that the animal itself should be sitting in the wild doing what it normally does – not sitting there breathing and waiting to be fed without sunlight or company of its own species. I mean they do reproduce and some of them even protect their eggs – they have a certain level of intelligence. But this is what we do, us humans. The worst part of it is that we know when things are not quite right but we still just leave it at that.
In the basement, there were also crocodiles. They were huge. They had their own enclosure and were well kept. Still, it was a limited enclosure and although they hadn’t seen different (they must have been babies when it all started), how is it OK to have kept them that way? I’m not pointing the finger, but the list could be very long if we stopped for one second and really thought about the things we do and see on a daily basis. This so called expert on TV was showing his snakes in these little boxed cages, saying there is really no safe enclosures for such creatures. Did I hear that right?
Instinct is strong. How often do we say “I knew it, I never should have…”. But it’s become a natural thing to ignore instinct. When Leigha was born I tried breastfeeding and it was awful. They told me to put her on each side for 10 minutes and then to feed her for as long as I could. What was that really suppose to mean? Shouldn’t I have listened to my baby or my instinct? It was a nightmare, one that was replaced by my smarts when my second child was born and I decided to do it my way. The boys’ mother told my daughter she so didn’t want them to go that evening – in the end, she gave in. She let them. Leigha told me JC always gets up in the night to check on the kids – was that by instinct? My dad checked on me every night before he went to bed. He did right up until I left for University at age 18. Once, when I was four I had my tonsils out and nearly drowned in my blood. He found me in his routine check. My dad always felt he should check on us – and he did. He saved two of his four children that way. Bleeders he would call us.
The press is something else and makes it all so much more difficult. I don’t know what’s wrong with the Canadian press, their reports are full of crap. It reminds me of these publications that depend on sensationalism. Hence, I rarely watch the news. I always feel I should wait until everything is out in the open, otherwise I really don’t know ANYTHING. This time it’s different, it hurts because I know the mother and knew the children and as a result I watch the news. But I have my own opinions and that’s even more difficult.
The python may not have fed as it should have as it was enclosed for so long – I think it was ten years (not sure here). That was my first question to Leigha. Did it eat well? How was it fed? How did it react? Did it react? There may be a lot to be said about these creatures in the wild but have we studied them in such conditions? Then I find out the kids had been playing on a farm with the animals. Obvious now I’m thinking as it must have been attracted to the smell. Food. An opportunistic animal – why not? Now it is said it fell through the ceiling. How’s that? Did it coil up and applied all of its weight in one spot? I don’t think so. Was the ceiling rotten??? How do we know that it would have “gripped” it’s victim with it’s teeth before coiling around it? One can essentially manipulate a little child that age in any way without waking it – especially after a busy day after which it’s “dead” tired. What if the child were completed relaxed and didn’t move would the animal have had to insert its teeth in its victim to coil around it? What about the people saying that the python would have swallowed them already? Really? My common sense tells me that the feeding process is not instantaneous – it’s not like like the snake has little arms to push its prey into its throat. There seems to be little if any common sense with the press. They are interviewing all these experts and yet asking all the wrong questions.
Then there’s the public and the way people react. My mother is getting older and she’s living in an apartment building for seniors. The information she comes up with is painful for me. I tell her not to listen and assume – it’s always better to ask ourselves questions rather than taking it all in I tell her.
It’s so easy to blame the man who was sleeping in the next room while the life was sucked out of these two little boys.
I blame the community and the authorities who lay dormant before human ignorance.
Sheep in a basket 