Late Night Surprise
On this Thursday night at a Mae Hong Son guesthouse in Northern Thailand the silence of darkness fills the room and my mind. I’m tired. My mind is set on the last chapter of the novel I’m reading, and the bus I’ll take out of town in the morning. The road to Chiang Mai, famously, takes 1436 curves in 5 hours. Good sleep is almost a necessity. It was a kind of sleep that I would not receive.
It’s 10:30pm.
“Rowan, have you ever tasted snake meat?”, the host mixes surprise with anticipation – talk about a sure way to grab a herbivore’s attention.
“Snake meat you say? Never. Now where would we find that?”
My fatigue gets up and leaves the room as a shot of adrenaline courses through my body. “She’s got to be joking”.
She was not, in fact, playing a practical joke on us. She turned the screen of her phone to us and we caught a glimpse of the python stretched across the dark floor illuminated by the flash of the smartphone. Her nephew and his friends had caught the big one.
“There’s no way it’s that big in person… right?….Right? Guys?”
The Beast
That night some chickens were spared death by snake. A snake that, as it would turn out, was actually a whole lot bigger than it looked on the 6 inch screen. The chicken’s power was out, so with flashlight and what i can only imagine was a large blunt object, the hunters put an end to the fowl threat.
Back at the guesthouse, we catch word that we would host a barbecue. An LED light is hung and a tarp is laid out. Seconds later the reverberations of the Thai scooter fills our ears. Six men with proud expressions, and a heavy burlap sack, unload themselves from four bikes.
As the snake unwinds itself onto the blue tarp, I see light scales highlighted by dark tapestries all along its back and sides. At its middle point, had I touched it, I would not have been able to wrap both my hands around it – the late (bless his cold blooded heart) boy is girthy. As we awe-fully examine the beast, we recall the reason that the snake is here in the first place. We are not zoologists, but we are hungry. It’s about time to perform the butchering ritual.
The Ethics of Killing a Snake
What can be said of the ethics of such an event. According to Wikipedia, the python bivittatus commonly known as the Burmese python, is a vulnerable species and no wonder: the snake, can grow up to 16ft in length and makes prey of creatures that humans hold dear. Cats, dogs, chickens and human children are at risk of being devoured, and yet it is reasonable to ask: is it right to kill an animal that is simply trying to fend for itself and it’s young?
The nuance required to answer such a question, and it is beyond my skillset, but I’ll give it an old-fashioned try all the same. As the snake lay in front of me, I was looking at one of the greatest predators in the jungle. I was reminded of a surprisingly similar event that happened at the family farm in Lavington, B.C.. That evening, the dogs were acting a bit funny. As we followed their nervous barks and growls my dad and I came across a headless goat. A goat none the larger than my youngest siblings. In the tree above its lifeless body was a large predatory mammal. The mere existence of this type of animal is the reason why we submit the dogs to bark until late into the night. If my dad was fearful, he contained it behind a stoic and courageous face. He took aim, squeezed the trigger and put a bullet straight through the cougar’s heart. Falling from its perch, the goat killer took one swing at the dog foolish enough to crowd her, but she crumpled before the blow landed. It took the two of us to pull the beautiful stinking beast, reeking of pheromones and blood, onto the road where the family circled around her and examined with bulging eyes. And no we did not eat cougar meat that night.
In nature, animals will go to extremes to protect what mother nature calls them protect most of all – the continuation and protection of their genetic code. In civilization humans can forget that we are not separate from nature. That, somehow, we are not simply page out out of evolution’s playbook. Our opposable thumbs and our neocortex give us the ability to manipulate the world around us to a degree that is far beyond the capabilities of any other animal. We build habitats, shelters, houses, villages and cities that guard us from some of the most dangerous features of nature. In doing so we can forget that we are a part of the natural system that is the lifeblood of our existence.
Despite our haughtiness and perceived elevated status among beasts we are intrinsically connected to the laws of nature, a speck on the evolutionary timeline or, and I think this is where the problem arises, pawns of a force that is far out out of human control. It is this lack of control that leads man to wall itself in cities and escape cruel nature, but even this effort, while often rationalized as being a denial of our essence, is merely a product of our existence as natural beings. Our emotional response to nature, purveyed to our perception from the amygdala via the neocortex, leads us to shoot a mountain lion, build a door, and bat at a snake – all done with the intention of protecting our most valuable assets from the uncertainty of nature. Can you blame the cougar for killing the goat or the snake for killing the chicken?
It has been claimed that with brains as powerful as ours ought to be able to ensure the survival of our own without a serious impact on our fellow creatures. I say that that claim is a denial of our nature. We cannot escape billions of years of evolution. There are those who will read this and suppose that I am excusing humanity’s treatment of nature, including our brutal self-treatment. I am to an extent. As beasts of nature it is completely understandable that human behaviour, at times, falls short of our human abstracted ideal. However, held within us is a rationality that is the mode of metaphysical design, it is this rationality that can separate us from the darker side of our nature.
Above all things, I think that it is rationality mixed with a measure of fear that has brought about the solutions of many of humanities greatest problems and there’s reason to believe that this recipe will repeat its success in years to come. Putting humanity first is not wrong, it is free from morals for it is our natural state. It is wrong, however, to do so out of greed and blatant disregard of the other creatures that have survived to this point. Evidently, we need them for our survival, and future generations will be thankful for all that we saved.
The Butcher
The man who killed the snake, was no older than 20 years old, courageous and about as wise as you might expect. Immediately you could sense his excitement as he watched some of his buddies prepare the flames, and the others cut up the snake – his work was done for the evening.
A thick layer of scales and skin separated our mouths from the meat. After examination, the course of action was to cut into the skin and carve it away from what is edible. Max, on staff at the hostel, has experience in the French restaurant scene and claims that removing the skin from the snake was not unlike skinning a salmon. As the snake a.k.a. the land fish is butchered, its nerves, still active, slither along the tarp giving it a semblance of life.
“Are you sure this thing is dead?” as I look again at the snakes crushed face.
“You’d know if it wasn’t” our host translated the words of the man who was driving a knife through it’s flesh.
The thin line between life and death rips as I look into the bloody eyes of the predator. Earlier that evening, this beast is the king of the of the undergrowth, picking off any and all creatures that can not evade his stealthy attacks, and few can. What was passing through his mind as he slithered into the chicken coop on what was certainly not his first time? “Easssy prey, thessse ssstanding creaturesss raissse tasssty meat to fill my hunger”.
The Meal
A primeval feeling punctuated the atmosphere as the steaks roasted over the open flame. Man’s eternal enemy was soon to be his next meal. We had met with the Fortune herself that evening. It was the first time our Thai host had ever eaten snake meat or even seen a snake of this size. The hunters, sure they’d seen a python but never a python like this one. Sufficed to say, this night was story worthy.
Now what does snake meat taste like? This question has been bugging you ever since you opened this blog five minutes ago. I’ll tell you. It tastes just like the beef jerky we had made at the Hungarian deli up the road from our house in North Kamloops. Gary seasoned the best cuts of meat and smoked them over the weekend. The taste reminds me of the Monashee mountains in south western British Columbia. After hours of hiking, we’d sit at the edge of one of such lakes and chew the jerky until it made our jaws sore. The taste reminds me of campfire stories, and the warmth of the hot stones wrapped in an old t-shirt and pushed to the bottom of the sleeping bag so that we could bear the freezing nights. Or yeah… chicken, python meat tastes like chicken.
Long after the other foreigners had resigned to the dream world, the four remaining hunters and I snacked on the remaining morsels. We had it flame griled and boiled, all washed down with a few shots of Thai rice whiskey and a couple of dirty cigarettes. We listened to Dylan, Cobain, and Rihanna and told stories that they or I could barely understood depending on who was teller. By the time I pulled the sheets over me, the roosters were warning the residents of Mae Hong Son of a new day.
Jiboia
Two days later, I landed in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh) for a visa run. I chose a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu house to train for the week and an Airbnb only a few steps away. One of the better martial arts facilities on the Indochinese peninsula, the place stole my heart even before I noticed Jiboia’s emblem – a snake.
All thoughts and ideas are my own. If you disagree with any of the arguments made in this blog post, or if you think there is something I missed, please do not hesistate to find me on a social or send me an email at rowanfroese@gmail.com.
Special thanks to all the characters in this story, I will never forget your faces. And thanks to my readership, there are more tales to be told.
Written and edited by: Rowan Huff Froese
Becoming Superhuman 
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