Wherein Bry calls AA a liar.

After some strange dreams last night, I decided to debunk the story AA told me about the python. I was so grossed out, but rationally I knew it wasn't possible.

My Internets research took two seconds. The very first thing I googled "snakes measure prey" brought up a snopes.com article. The first half of the article was the exact story I posted last night. And then it called it an urban myth and gave this explanation for why it wasn't true.

Origins:   Although stories like these about snake owners being dangerously unaware that their pets are calmly sizing them up as the main courses of their next meals are interesting, they should be classified with other fictional tales of snake scarelore on the following bases: • Pythons don't measure their prey before going after their meals: They grab, they squeeze, they eat. There's little fretting in their nature about relative sizes of intended edibles, nor does all that much go into their thinking process. To look at it another way, if pythons were in the habit of measuring before striking, they'd starve. Their prey wouldn't willingly wait for them to finish mimicking tape measures before consenting to be eaten; they would hop away to safety as soon as they noticed large snakes stretching out alongside them. • For a snake to slurp up a human, it would not only have to be at least as long as its prospective dinner, but also capable of ingesting the width of the person. While a really big snake could indeed swallow a person's arm, it's quite unlikely that the kinds of snakes typically kept in homes could get its jaws open wide enough to take in an adult human's head and shoulders. • Those who keep fairly large snakes as pets know that it's perfectly normal for their pets to go without food for fairly long periods of time and thus scoff at the notion that a snake's not eating would be cause to rush it to a vet. • No vet would reasonably counsel having a snake put down because it hadn't eaten of late and thus must be planning to make a meal of its owner. (There are other methods for dealing with non-eating snakes, including, in extreme circumstances, force-feeding.)