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My husband brought up a very interesting question after I caught a bunch of garter snakes today.

Now the sample size is small (8 animals), but the temperment seemed to be directly related to past injury.

Of the 8 snakes found, 3 had complete tails and the other 5 had part of their tail missing.

The 3 with complete tails were very docile and took there capture in stride, while those that had been injured in the past were very defensive, musking and biting me.

My husband thought that maybe the ones that have are already injured are in a sence jaded. They've already lost part of their tails and they don't have anything else to lose, so they may as well fight as hard as they can. While the others, who have yet to experience pain of injury, don't know what this capture might mean for them (if I was a predator rather than an inoffensive herper).

Any thoughts?
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alstiver@hotmail.com

1.0 2001 Hypo snow cornsnake
0.1 2002 Pastel Ghost cornsnake
1.1 2002 Bloodred cornsnakes
0.1 1998 Het Hypo, Het Caramel cornsnake
1.0 2000 Hypo Het Caramel cornsnake

I think that if somebody cut off my tail, I might carry a grudge or even get a complex. I'd certainly want to bite the nearest thing, at the very least.

I'm concerned that someone is being careless with a shovel, but you have to at least appreciate their lousy aim. Makes me think of a story: A man had a three-legged pig. A neighbor asked how he got that way, so the man explained how the pig once rescued a whole family from a burning farmhouse. The neighbor said fine but you still didn't answer my question, to which the man replied that the pig once pulled his daughter out of a river just as she was about to be swept away. The neighbor said that's great but HOW did he get to be three-legged, to which the man said you don't want to eat a smart pig like that all at once.