Sprinkles The Cobra

"Do you want to watch me feed Sprinkles?"

"Heck yeah I do." I reply as I walk out my Branch President's front door to meet the baby King Cobra he caught in his front yard a few days ago. It's a cute little serpent of death, named Sprinkles. Sprinkles the Cobra. I'll pause to let that sink in.

We get out onto the front porch of his house, which apparently, is where you keep live baby cobras, and I am confronted with an old aqurium with a screen lid and a brick holding it in place. "This is going to be interesting," I think to myself.

"Ok. Now I'll grab the brick and the lid. You keep a flashlight on him as I toss in his dinner," which is a gecko that one of his boys just caught for him. Every Animal Planet snake show I have seen flicks across my consciousness. This is going to be awesome.

He tosses in the gecko and quickly replaces the lid and the brick. I have the flash light trained on Sprinkles like an FBI agent about to take down Hannibal Lecter. "So I just learned from my neighbor that apparently baby cobras are even more poisonous than a mature King Cobra," he pauses for a second as Sprinkles stirs. "Yeah, since they haven't learned to control the flow of their venom when they sink their tiny little fangs into their victim, they kind of over do it." Cute, right? Sprinkles slithers around a little bit, but shows no interest in his dinner. I track his movements with my flashlight with laser precision.

"We probably won't see him eat. I haven't yet." Pres. Renner says. "Let's see if we can't get his attention." He raps on the glass. Sprinkles does not like this. He smacks the aquarium again and out comes the hood. "Cool" I croon. I tap on the glass and Sprinkles is striking so fast that it is as if he knew that I was going to do it. In a flash I am jumping back, retracting my finger from the glass, and screaming like a girl "WHOA!" Even though there is a pane of glass between me and my poisonous little friend, it is funny how deep the instinct for self preservation is.

I want to clarify something real quick. President Renner is an awesome dude. He was SF in the Army and has done some work in private security so he has the kind of stories that you can write movies about. This is probably why he is so chillaxed about his new pet. I, on the other hand, have a huge phobia of snakes, especially the poisonous ones. That didn't stop me from asking Kim on the way home that night if I could have a pet cobra some day. The answer of course was, "not a chance."