Imagine renting a snake to a zoo for 7 months for $21,000....
I'd raise a retic for that no problem.
COLUMBUS (AP) — Before he could help Jack Hanna land a featured inhabitant for the new Asia Quest exhibit at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, a python breeder needed some specifics.
“Do you want a big snake,” Bob Clark asked, “or a really big snake?”
“I want a really big snake,” replied Hanna, the zoo’s director emeritus.
What Hanna got, if only temporarily, was Clark’s favorite: a 24-foot reticulated python, about as long as a moving van and thick as a telephone pole.
Her name is Fluffy.
But Clark, of Oklahoma City, raised the python from a hatchling and won’t part with it for long. Hanna said he was only half joking when he raised his offer to $50,000 to buy Fluffy outright, but Clark refused.
They worked out a seven-month lease for $21,000. The snake goes on display to the public April 7 in Columbus, billed by the zoo as the largest snake in captivity.
Eight workers carried the snake Friday to a 25-foot-long enclosure with a pool and a few plants. It’s much more spacious than the snake’s plainer digs in Oklahoma, Clark said.
“Boy, she looks great in there,” he said, observing the move.
Fluffy eats two frozen 10-pound rabbits a week. In the wild, pythons native to Asia eat whatever they can catch, starting with mice and lizards when they’re small and graduating to pigs and goats. There are a few reports of human victims.
The largest reticulated python, named for the cross-hatching patterns on their skin, was a 32 feet, 9 1/2 inches when killed in 1912 in Indonesia.
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