Many happy pet owners will tell you that snakes are beautiful, but for many they are frightening.
If you take the time to become familiar with snakes and handle them then no doubt you will come to appreciate them as friendly, low-maintenance pets.
However, there is no getting away from the fact that these reptiles are predators that consume their prey whole, sometimes after suffocating them to death.
One interesting thing to note about snakes is that they have no way to regulate their body temperature other than selecting a suitable environment to live.
So any prospective snake owner needs to make sure that he knows what a suitable temperature is for the vivarium and how to regulate it.
Snakes evolved as a limbless form of lizard, but they have some different habits from the lizards that they evolved from.
For example, when lizards lose their skin, they eat it, but snakes just discard their skin after sloughing.
And also their internal organs are quite different because of the way they are elongated to fit into a snake's body.
In terms of senses snakes don't even have external ears and they rely on picking up sounds from vibrations in their body.
This is true of all snakes, even tree-dwelling ones like green tree pythons.
Snakes are, however, famed for their forked tongues and these constantly gather particles from the outside as they flit in and out.
These particles are then processed by a special organ that the snake has - this Jackobsons organ is basically what snakes use to taste and smell.