fuckyeahherpetology:

Hah, well! I have a few. 

At my old facility we had two king cobras. One was a young female and one was Thai. A 10ft monster boy who was actually very sweet if he wasn’t terrifying. He never showed any interest in biting anyone. 
The weird thing about Thai is he knew when it was feeding time. Always. The time of day and the day of the week. Some snakes can get used to this schedule but it never seemed as precise as it was for him. He always knew and he knew who fed him. We trained him to move to a certain side of the cage before it was opened (this was a small facility, we didn’t have hold box systems that are really nice at a lot of zoos). We would do this by tapping against the side of the cage and he’d go, sit, and watch you. He’d keep an eye on you until you closed the door (usually we were filling water bowls with a water spout at this time and pulling out poop with tongs, but the cage was huge). Then he’d come back once the door was closed mostly because he knew the food would be on the end of tongs in the door. 

There was one time that part of the cage wasn’t fastened correctly. My co-worker and friend was in there working in the cage under his with the Indian Pythons and he pushed the door open and started crawling out. She looked up and froze, since he was right by her face. He looked at her for a few moments before looking away and slowly sliding out of the cage like it was no big deal. My poor friend nearly had a heart-attack but ran to the back room where our boss was just yelling THAI and he went in and hooked him back into the cage no problem. 

They’re really odd snakes to work with. Rewarding but very intimidating because of their intelligence.