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A common bit of serpentlore is cast as a warning to snake owners who are dangerously unaware that their pets are calmly sizing them up as the main courses of their next meals: Although such stories are interesting, they should be classified with other fictional tales of snake scarelore on the following bases: Some elements of the legend were reflected in a February 2008 news story out of Australia involving the swallowing of a family dog by a snake. According to news accounts of the incident, the Peric family (husband, wife, and two children) watched in horror as their chihuahua was gobbled up by a 16 ft. scrub python on the veranda of their home in tropical Kuranda, Queensland. Although the snake wasn't a pet (it lived in the wild), Mr. Daniel Peric maintained that prior to the fatal attack the python had stalked the family's dog for days. (Four days before the pooch became the snake's dinner, the python had reportedly been seen in the dog's bed on the veranda.) This family had trouble with snakes before: The body of the Perics' cat had been found in the preceding weeks, looking as if something had tried to swallow it, and a week prior to the dog's demise a smaller python ate their pet guinea pig. Regardless of the realities of serpentine behavior, the legend about a snake-measured girl is popular because it gives voice to a widespread fear of that which slithers. Herpetologists aside, many people view snakes as dangerous and unwholesome, perhaps even evil, and therefore feel uncomfortable and somewhat threatened in their presence. Stories like this one serve to confirm such assessments as not only is the pet in the tale planning to eat a person, but is stealthily and sneakily working out when to make its move, all under the guise of being affectionate towards the people caring for it. (Interestingly, the fear people seem to be expressing in repeating this story is not of being killed by a snake, but rather of being eaten by one.) The veterinarian who reveals the true state of things is a stock figure who appears in other urban legends, such as the Choking Doberman (burglar's fingers found in the throat of a guard dog reveal danger lurking in a closet at home) and the Mexican Pet (languishing dog adopted in a foreign land exposed as giant rat). Such an expert is needed to fill in the blanks in these narratives — in this case, without the vet's helpful explanation to clue us in, we wouldn't have known the ill-intentioned snake was measuring the girl, or what its purpose was for doing so. Sightings: The snake measures its intended victim tale appears in the 2012 Paul Theroux fiction The Lower River.
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