Aesop Fable No 176 - In sinu viperam habere (to have a snake in the breast)

Filmmaker Linus Chung on family stories and his pet snake

[I've extracted only the following for my post]

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When you see the picture of Chung with his pet, you are naturally curious.

“The snake is licensed under Perhilitan, our wildlife department and has been with us for years. It had entered the church I go to (Church of St Francis Xavier in Pataling Jaya) and bit the parish priest Father Simon Kong. “

“I suggested that he tame it and make it a parish pet. He actually did that and even walked around the church with the snake. After he took a position in another church (in 2011) and couldn’t take the snake with him, I took it in (I was still single then) and it has now become part of the family," explained Chung.

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kt comments:

I have an important advice for Linus Chung - return the snake to Perhilitan a.s.a.p. Snakes are NOT pack animals like dogs, wolves, lions and horses, etc, and thus do not consider themselves members of a family. It is a solitary animal and only comes into contact with another snake of its kind during the mating season.

Thus, Linus Chung's snake does NOT consider itself a member of the Chung family, as would a pet dog if Linus owns one.

It doesn't recognise who or what is its family member(s), thus it can and may eat a human being when hungry. Linus has three small children which in the presence of a python (a snake type which has swallowed human beings more than once before) worries the hell out of me.

I have a friend who kept a live python as a pet, but one day, while he wasn't looking, it constricted and swallowed his dog (who supposedly had co-existed with the python for years). The danger of being swallowed by a python (of the size of Linus Chung's snake) exists constantly.

As the Latin saying goes, in sinu viperam habere which means "to have a snake in the breast."

It relates to an Aesop's Fable called 'The Farmer and the Viper' (No: 176 in the Perry Index). Aesop Fables usually inform on morals, where this one talks about an act of kindness to an evil will be met by betrayal.

The Aesop story concerns a farmer who finds a viper freezing in the snow. Taking pity on it, he picks it up and places it within his coat. The viper, revived by the warmth, bites his rescuer, who dies realising that it is his own fault.

I have witnessed how an office mate A (an office manager) recommended his close friend B for a job in our office. B eventually replaced A as office manager (same post) in a 'spill', what Australians called a major administrative-organisational upheaval of positions in a department (or office) and re-appointment of office bearers (t'was every person for him or herself in the shakeup). B was the viper that A nurtured in his bosom but who in the end bit him, as B was the treacherous instigator of the 'spill'. 

I hope Linus Chung will carefully re-consider the clear and present danger of his three still very young children living together with a huge python.