If you take your pet to a park in South Dakota, you better put a leash on it…even it can’t technically run. Otherwise you might end up like Jerry Kimball, who was ticketed on April 1 for letting his four-month old Fire Bee Ball Python slither in the grass of park in Sioux Falls.
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“It was April Fool’s Day, so I thought he was playing a joke,” Kimball told the Argus Leader. “They’re not fast creatures. They’re not going to run away.”
The $190 fine for “animals running at large” didn’t bother Kimball so much as the park Animal Control Officer’s proposal that he put a leash on the snake. “He was literally asking me to put a rope around my snake,” Kimball said. “I was like ‘dude, no.’ I was dumbfounded.”
While it obviously wasn’t “running,” a spokeswoman for Animal Control told the Argus Leader the snake was still technically “at large.”
“If it’s in public and it’s not on a leash, it’s at large,”Julie DeJong said. “The ordinance doesn’t really distinguish between animals.”
The incident was apparently prompted by a woman who saw another of Kimball’s snakes and called Animal Control. While DeJong suggested that Kimball should take people’s fear of snakes into consideration before taking his pets in public, he thinks that’s all the more reson to show the world his snakes.
“That’s my purpose in life: To let people know that snakes aren’t killers,” Kimball said. “What better way to give back than to help people understand these misunderstood creatures.”
