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Alternative Pets?


alexm
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Blimey.

My father was a marine engineer up the jungle on the Irawadi River in Burma during the Second World War. Conditions were hard and food was scarce. To supplement their rations when there were any, they ate snake, iguana, monkey and jungle fowl. I remember he said the snake was a bit like chicken and the monkeys were like pork. He also said that the side vents on the lorry cabs were welded shut as small snakes were sometimes thrown into the cab as the jungle brushed by. I also remember that he said that these large snakes were a problem to the larger lorries also. The drivers were instructed to stop and let the snake cross over the jungle tracks and not to run over them. The reason for this was that if the driver drove over the snake it reared up into the air under the middle of the lorry and got wrapped around the propshaft. Quite often the snake was so large that it acted like a brake and jammed the drive and it took ages to cut a sometimes still alive and very angry snake out from under the lorry with a machete. They probably put it into the cook pot afterwards.

He had quite a few stories of soldiering up the jungle. Some of them were a bit horrific. He didn’t come home the young man he was when he went out there.

Edited by fortune
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Lol, thats just the tip of the iceberg!!! :lol:

 

I thought my feeding bill was bad, but yours must be horrific! :lol:

 

 

 

 

 

I'm a sucker for misunderstood critters. Here are my other house guests... a mixed shoal of piranha. The tank is 8' x 2.5' x 2.5'. There are four different types in there (3 distinct species) from the Amazon and the Orinoco rivers and tributaries. Four of the red bellies I raised from tiny little babies... the rest were wild caught at about 3". The biggest are now a good foot long.

 

alexm_aquarium.jpg

 

They eat mainly a fish diet, whole trout, large sandeel, salmon and occasionally beef heart and contrary to popular belief they are not indiscriminate, aggressive killers... they are actually very wary, extremely alert of their surroundings and, for fish, have amazingly individual and quirky character traits. :lol:

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