Irascible Reptile : Cranky Python’s Handlers Seek Buyer After Snake Wears Out His Welcome

Bonnie is in a bad mood. In fact, Bonnie is always in a bad mood.

A tough 7-year-old who weighs maybe 90 pounds, Bonnie would rather curl up in a corner than consort with strangers. The idea of people getting too close makes Bonnie rear back and stick out his tongue.

That’s right, Bonnie is a boy. A male Burmese python, with a striking net-like pattern along his ample length. Right now, he has a bulge down near the middle of his nine-foot body. That’s yesterday’s dinner, a three-pound chicken, feathers and all, slowly being digested. It makes him especially cranky.

For the past five years, Bonnie has resided at the San Gabriel Valley Humane Society and Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in San Gabriel. Bonnie, whom animal handlers originally mistook for a female, was the pet of a drug dealer who escaped a police raid. Police turned the snake over to the nonprofit organization.

But now the society wants to get rid of him. They have put Bonnie up for sale. Enough is enough, suggest the handlers. Who needs an irascible python hanging around all the time?

“Right now, he’s ready to shed,” says kennel master John Esparza, giving Bonnie a wary look. “He just finished eating and his eyes are fogged up. He really doesn’t like being handled.”

Recently, Bonnie took a poke at one of the kennel men. The man reached into Bonnie’s cage and the python butted him on the arm with his head. Of course, Bonnie is a constrictor and not poisonous. When he strikes, he’s not likely to cut somebody or pierce the skin with fangs.

“More likely, he’ll leave a bruise,” Esparza says.

If only Bonnie behaved like the other pythons at the society: like Bowser, a sociable 17-footer who curls up at your feet while you do your paperwork, or Jake, a three-footer who likes to wrap himself around children’s arms while they stroke his head.

But Bonnie is a grouch. “He hisses and snaps his jaw at you,” says executive director Joan Coleman. “You can’t take him around small children.”

When handlers Esparza and Michael Barr take Bonnie out of his cage to display his full length, they use a device called snake tongs, which close around the skinny part of Bonnie’s body, at the base of his skull.

“He’s not going to like this,” says the animal handler.

Bonnie has played this game before. He wriggles away from the tool, tucking his head under the thick part of his body. Esparza taps him and pokes him, until he can snap the tongs around Bonnie’s neck. Esparza and Barr lift the python out of the cage, his tongue darting out of his mouth, his body writhing obstinately. The undigested chicken bulges in Bonnie’s midsection, like a slowly deflating soccer ball.

Coleman says Bonnie’s problem isn’t that people think he’s a girl. It’s that he doesn’t get handled enough. The 20 workers at the society--whose brood these days includes 250 dogs, 25 cats, four raccoons, three red-tailed hawks, a Shetland pony, an Arctic fox, a parrot, a deer and a barn owl--just don’t have time.

“Handle a python and he’ll be perfectly tractable,” says Coleman. “If you don’t handle him, he becomes antisocial.”

On the front counter of the society’s office on Grand Street is a “for sale” sign, with a snapshot of Bonnie on his best behavior.

He’s doing a figure 8, showing off the handsome reticulation on his flanks.

The society would like to sell him to, say, an amiable herpetologist, someone who really like snakes.

“We’d like to find a home for him with someone who can spend more time with him,” Coleman says.

They’ll listen to any reasonable offer. Which is more than you can say for Bonnie.