Are you serious? Not mocking you, just voicing my incredulity.......
With that being said, I may be the only FReeper who actually encountered a Boa in the wild and witnessed an attack on my friend who was almost killed by one of these monstrous snakes.
Well, it wasn't really an attack and the boa wasn't really that big. When I first arrived in Panama in the Army, I was assigned to a company on Flamenco Island which was the furthermost island at the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal.
There were a total of three islands connected by a causeway and ours was the furthermost out.
One day my friend and I decided to explore the rocky perimeter of the island closest to us and not far onto the island we encountered a baby boa about 30 inches long and when my friend attempted to pick it up (the wrong way) it turned and bit him.........He freaked out thinking he had just been bitten by a poisonous snake and was going to die and I laughed my butt off.............
Well, he survived and I was able to retain and cherish the memory of a friend being attacked by a legitimate, wild boa constrictor............LOL!
In the wild, these animals will defend themselves if they feel threatened. It’s just a natural response.
In captivity, yes, they are very capable of affection (to the degree they are capable of as reptiles) and never underestimate their intelligence. People make the mistake of falling for the reptilian brain crap. The problem with that is the studies done were flawed by doing a direct structural comparison between mammalian and reptilian brains. That is currently being debunked through new studies and behavioral experiments.
It was your friend who initiated an attack on the snake. If you believe you have the right to self defend, the snake deserves the same. So no, your friend wasn't attacked.
Well, that was a tantalizing yet anticlimactic tale!
:D
Yes, they get attached and know their people.
Pinky, who used to go to biker events with me, before we simply stopped having them in the area, anymore, would chum up to everyone and let himself be carried and hugged until he got weary and then he’d slither his way back to me, often going from one person to another until he reached me.
If we were there for more than a couple hours, he would crawl into his backpack and nap for a while, coming out refreshed and ready for more adulation from the crowds.
One particularly long day, he got tired but his backpack was in the bike so he looped himself through the armholes of my vest and slept like that, sort of like a hammock, for about an hour, as I continued to walk around.
There’s a lot more to snakes than you think.