Aochan, the snake 'seems to enjoy' being with Gohan, the hamster A rodent-eating snake and a hamster have developed an unusual bond at a zoo in the Japanese capital, Tokyo, the Associated Press news agency reports. Their relationship began in October last year, when zookeepers presented the hamster to the snake as a meal.
The rat snake, however, refused to eat the rodent. The two now share a cage.
"I have never seen anything like it," a zookeeper at the Mutsugoro Okoku zoo said, adding that the hamster was known to fall asleep sitting atop the snake.
The hamster was initially offered to Aochan, the two-year-old rat snake, because it was refusing to eat frozen mice, the Associated Press reports.
As a joke, the zookeeper said they named the hamster Gohan - the Japanese word for meal.
"I don't think there's any danger. Aochan seems to enjoy Gohan's company very much," zookeeper Kazuya Yamamoto told the Associated Press news agency.
The apparent friendship between the snake and hamster is one of many reported bonds spanning the divide between predator and prey.
Couple things come to mind:
1) What are they feeding the snake now?
2) How comfortable do you think the hamster is with this new found friendship?
If you follow the link there is a nice little picture of the two of them.
Homeless
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Maybe they should put another hamster in there and see if the snake can distinguish between lunch and his buddy, the new hamster could be like the guinnea pig to the experiment. That'd be cool.
And why wouldn't they use a live white mouse in the first place.
edited up by SNS
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[size=14][b]Letters from the procupine, they'll stick straight through you.
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Maybe they've gone back to frozen mice? How does that affect the hamster?
Homeless wrote:2) How comfortable do you think the hamster is with this new found friendship?
I'm betting that is one seriously messed-up hamster. Watching the snake eat its friends day in and day out - he has to be in a state of terror unlike anything we could imagine.
I'm betting the hamster cracked within the first 30 seconds of this "relationship" and he's in la-la land, unaware of all of this.
Of course, sometime in the next 30 days Gohan will come up "missing" and everything will be back to normal.
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by Homeless » Thu Jan 19, 2006 11:07 am 
That'd be cool.
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