We bought her and three other babies from Tom Crutchfield for $400 each in September 1990. They were expensive because Tom guaranteed that they were dwarfs and they would be sexually mature at seven feet long. One died within a week. The other female we named Hellbxtch and today she lives in the Memphis Zoo and is quite a large girl herself.
The male we never named, he is the exhibit retic at the Rio Grande Zoo in Albuquerque (I'm sure the keepers there have their own pet names for him if his temperament hasn't changed for the better.)
I named the big one Marcus (I originally thought "she" was a "he."
She grew so much and so fast that we suspected that we had her missexed and the San Antonio Zoo correctly sexed her when they had her tranquilized. They now call her "Marsha."
The S.A. Zoo came to us and made us an offer that we couldn't refuse when the snake was four and measured 19 feet. The week before we were to deliver her to the Zoo, she shed and left a patch on top of her head.
Exactly how it happened is a long enough story on its own, but as I was trying to get that shed off her head, she got excited and bit me on the back of my left leg, right above the knee. It was the smallest nip she could deliver, but it cut (actually nicked) three arteries.
I'd never seen true arterial bleeding before--most impressive and memorable. We tried, but couldn't stop the bleeding. I ended up in the hospital for about six hours. They had to put in some very deep sutures to draw close the cuts on the arteries, and then after several hours, they declared my bleeding as ended and then stitched up the four-inch-long, deep slash that had been made by her right maxillary teeth, and a couple of other pretty impressive wounds made by her palatine teeth.
Moral to the story? Don't be bitten by a big retic. They have quite large teeth and the long front teeth have a cutting edge on the back margin of each tooth, unlike the round teeth of most pythons.
