Imagine if your door-to-door Christian evangelist types never had to go door to door. Imagine if all they had to do was sit at home, relaxing, and wait for people to come by to ask them about the baby Jesus.

That’s what it’s like with snake keeping: when interested people find out that you have them, they come to you.

We just had four people — the neighbour’s older son and three of his friends — over for an hour showing them our collection. It was kind of spontaneous: they were out back and decided to ask to see the snakes. And we took four people who were, at best, ambivalent to a little bit interested and, after about an hour, had them all at least touching the snakes, and two of them doing an awfully good job at handling them — and one of them muttering about getting one himself.

It doesn’t always go that well, but the people who knock on your door asking to see snakes are, at least, self-selecting.

(I need to mention — as I do in my reptiles FAQ — that we don’t make a habit of offering tours of our collection. We’re not a zoo. We knew these people, so we were happy to oblige, but we’d generally like our evenings to ourselves, thank you very much.)