A snake saves the zoo
(vore, digestion, disposal, pet prey)
Ever since digital forms of entertainment started taking over, the zoo had been slowly declining. Visitors came more sparsely and unlike ten years ago, children no longer bullied their parents into taking them to see their favourite animals over, and over again.
It had been a particularly harsh decline for the reptile house since they had a lot of expensive animals and equipment to maintain. At some point the staff was forced to scrape up roadkill to get enough meat for the various lizards they still tried to keep.
But recently things started to look up again, as the zoo’s own entrance into the digital market had shown some fruits. Lifestreaming certain events had drawn in more visitors again and some cute little birds were very popular on the net. But that alone was not enough. What really caused the whole zoo to prosper again was the questionable blossom of the online initiative which bloomed in the reptile house after closing hours. Suffice to say, the scaly inhabitants were no longer wanting for fresh meat, the snakes in particular.
While cute birdies and yawning lynxes were good to get the attention of children back, the snake feeding streams brought in actual money by reaching a rather curious audience with deep enough pockets. As a result, their already huge anaconda had grown rapidly in length and particularly in girth over the last two years since the initiative had started. And tonight, he was going to get fed again.
 
A decent camera was placed on a tripod above the deeply dug terrarium of the massive reptile. Malu, the hungry star of the reptile house, was currently mostly submerged in the murky little pond he spent a lot of time in when he was not actively digesting something. It had been some three weeks since his last meal and the healthy beast had shed his skin since and was now displaying the best shiny olive green and dark brown any green anaconda could. Even though only a little of his nine meter long body was visible at the moment, the enormous size of his head showed everyone that there was a scary amount of hungry snake hidden just below that murky surface.
At some point the video transmission started and a zookeeper, careful to never appear in the field of view, explained what had happened last time and what was going to happen next.
“As our regular watchers know, last month a kind donor had brought his old dog over to give her a proper send off via the food chain.”
The man was convinced that someone had simply snagged up a runaway pet and enjoyed watching it become snake fat, but he really did not care and kept up the narrative.
“As luck would have it, the collar made it all the way through and now we had it cleaned and if any of you would like to have it for your own snacks, err pets, we are going to auction it off during tonight’s feeding.”
It ended up going for 45$, so someone could collar their pet with something that had been through a snake’s digestive tract before.
 
Then came the part the fifty odd watchers had been waiting for: The announcement of the first meal.
“Sorry folks, but this one is not going to make a bulge at all but free food is free food. Let’s see what Malu makes of it.”
Then a small cage was lowered down into the terrarium, the massive anaconda slowly slithering from his pool and showing off his enormous girth while the cage was being opened with a long stick. Out came some of those yappy little dogs which were commonly referred to as carpet rats. True to the stereotype the little fluffball actually approached the enormous reptile that was going to devour it. Seemingly thinking that those barks were going to change anything at all, the dog stood its ground, making a racket until a maw larger than its whole body opened up in front of it. The little canine tried to change its tune and run but only managed to give off a mix between a yapp and a squeal as the snake lazily closed his jaws around the dog’s head and started to feed.
The yaps and whines turned muffled as Malu slowly walked the segments of his lower jaws over his tiny snack, one pushing forwards, hooked teeth sinking in and pulling the prey back towards his gullet before the other half of his jaw did the same. Thanks to the ridiculous size difference between predator and snack, the anaconda’s teeth were actually long enough to scrape over the tiny dog’s bones on occasion. Soon there was nothing left to be seen at all, once the still living creature was pulled into the throat of the feeding snake who had not even bothered to unhinge his jaws for such a puny meal.
Still the chat of the stream was alive with excitement over the amount of domination displayed by the feeding reptile who seemed to have forgotten about the little prey’s existence even before it reached his vast stomach. The fans were particularly delighted when a faint crack came from within the snake, as his peristalsis alone has seemingly broken a bone or two, that was going to get dissolved anyway. Already Malu was flicking his tongue, waiting for the next cage to be lowered and the next animal to be put before him to meet its end inside his belly. He did not have to wait for long.
 
A simple pulley replaced the now empty cage with a distinctly larger one as the moderator narrated the next prey’s demise.
“Malunir’s next course is a shepherd with a limp. The old work dog is going to be taken care of by my loving boy. The owner was quite pleased with that story when I adopted the dog. I did not tell any lies but I may have left out that the boy in question was a 500 pound snake. In any case we will have another bleached collar for sale soon enough.”
 
When the cage door was opened, Malu saw himself in front of a canine of far more suitable size and infinitely better situational awareness. The shepherd did not even bother to try and scare the snake away. Instead he was doing his very best to stay in the cage, looking for a way to get away from the hungry reptile slithering towards him.
 
“No fair!” wrote one of the viewers. “We can’t see anything like this.” But another one had a different opinion.
“I think it’s hot how the snake goes into the cage and a bulge just appears. Besides he ate five dogs last time, you’ll see his maw work soon enough”
 
Eighty pounds of dog made quite a big impression in the snake’s coils and a lively one too. Limping or not the dog was fighting for his life as he was being eaten whole. Of course, breathing was hard when there was a thick layer of slime coated snake muscle, fat and scales around your chest, but even as the lack of air made it hard for the dog to keep up the fight, there still were the occasional kicks and squirms, even after his bulge settled in the snake’s huge belly.
“I wonder if the shep eats that carpet rat as a last meal now that they share a snake stomach” wrote someone but there was no time to discuss that question as the snake’s still unhinged jaws were already pointing at a new cage.
 
“Next up, we have a new first. One of our most devoted fans brought his own dog along and wants to show us and Malu what a good girl she is. Say hello and goodbye to Poppy, everyone.”
Another man whistled out of frame and astonishingly enough, a beautiful jet black Labrador walked right out of the cage, seemingly ignoring the massive snake and his kicking stomach bulge. At least until the visibly surprised snake resumed his meal and simply dropped one of his heavy coils on the dog and started to devour her. This time his hard working jaws were on full display. And it was almost as if Malu was putting on a show on purpose as he lifted his head upwards, the half eaten dog’s kicking legs dangling from his maw before a few mighty swallows pulled them down smoothly. Another pet dog had been reduced to a squirmy bulge inside the insatiable snake’s digestive tract. Soon Poppy would be an integral and indistinguishable part of the anaconda’s next bowel movement, except her copper tag of course.
But neither Malu nor his fans were new to such labelled snake shit or its making and so the feeding merrily continued. By now there was a lot of squirming meat compacted into one single bulge inside the snake’s vast and highly trained stomach. Over the months his body had adapted quite well to his very particular diet, allowing him to devour your typical pet creature with distinct speed, for a snake, and digesting them at an equally impressive rate. The next snacks to experience this wondrous trip through a cold blooded digestive tract were three young dobies which were apparently leftovers from a pet shop’s unsuccessful summer sale. Sure enough Malu intended to give them a good home as he basically inhaled the dogs, visibly enjoying that their shoulders were slimmer than his jaws and that he could consume them whole and alive with ease.
Their meek struggles were utterly restrained by the tight grip of his throat and swallowing muscles, rendering them almost boring to watch during their descent, if it was not for the distinct whining noises that could be followed down Malu’s meter long throat until his busy, groaning stomach muffled even those.
 
Soon the feeding was concluded. Malu had turned from a ravenous predator into a lethargic and very full serpent, peacefully resting, half asleep with his head laid on his massively swollen stomach. On occasion he was rudely shaken awake again when some of his doomed snacks reacted to the fresh acids his stomach squirted all over them. His eyes betrayed some nuisance when he received an uncalled for kick from one prey or another as he started to digest them alive. He could not wait for them to smooth out and turn into a nice nutritious liquid like they were meant to.
Eventually though the snake was left in peace as the stale air pockets in his gargantuan stomach filled with burning fumes which caused his surviving preys to cough up crumbled bits of their ruined lungs before their struggles reached a spasming end. From there on things were literally going smoothly for the anaconda and his guts. His lovely caretakers brought his favourite heat lamp over and allowed him to simply rest in the utmost comfort right where he had binged on all those little animals and expectedly sped up his metabolism further. By now the little animal shelter his stomach had become was half flooded with a highly concentrated mix of hydrochloric acid and digestive enzymes which softened the skin on his food.
While it would take his stomach a while to scrape all the bleaching fur off his prey and to break through the tough skin on the larger dogs, the bodies stewing in his stomach were not short on weak points. All those eyes, ears and nostrils were just as flooded and coated in acids as the rest of them. Before the many critters were duly skinned by the churning stomach walls, their eyeballs had popped into amorphous slime and allowed the digestive juices to seep deeper into them. Especially the smaller creatures were soon reduced to emptied skulls while the larger ones proved more nutritious and thus time consuming to process but their brains too started to seep through the many orifices left by long dissolved eyes and nostrils.
It took a lot of hard work but eventually Malu’s stomach burned its way deep enough into the lab and shep to thoroughly delaminate their large muscular bodies. The snake’s industrious belly gave off busy gurgles, that sounded almost happy, while the first dozen liters if former pet cocktail started to slosh further down into his intestines. By that point the main bulge in his midsection had shrunk and smoothed out considerably while another one was growing below it. This one was caused by the meaty soup his stomach cooked up and would grow as his meals were dissolved, absorbed and reduced to thick clumps of waste.
While this process already started, the anaconda’s stomach still had to work its way through dozens of kilos of fresh firm meat. On occasion he stirred in his sleep, causing his stomach to change shape and to mix through its contents more thoroughly than his peristalsis could achieve on its own. On one of these occasions, there was a nice soft squelch which was audible from outside Malu’s body. It sounded perfectly harmless but everyone who knew him, especially those who fed him a camera equipped dog once, knew what it was. The shep or the lab, one of the bigger meals, had broken open and now the snake’s stomach was churning around loosely floating canine entrails, from here on, digestion would progress rapidly.
The second bulge in Malu’s belly grew and hardened as days passed. More pet slush was pressed from his stomach to his intestines and the first batch containing all the bleached fur and some dulled claws was already hardening into solid reptile shit at the far end of the long digestive tract.
While the wild collection of jumbled bones was still getting eroded and churned down in the anaconda belly, all the meat was well and truly processed. The snake had grown noticeably thicker, other people’s unwanted pets now layered on his flanks as added fat. In the wild this feast would leave him fed for months but his body had adapted to captivity and happily pumped the energy gained into his growth, certain that he would get another feast before long.
Bit by mushy brown bit, the snake’s guts syphoned the useful parts out of the indistinguishable paste flowing through him. The fuel of a reptilian predator. Hours passed until eventually all of it, even the crushed bones were packed into the end of his intestines and it was time to vacate his digestive tract so it could be filled anew with fresh unlucky meat.
 
Eventually the heat lamp was gone and so were the bulges in Malu’s body. Just his tail end looked unproportionally thick but the nature of that swelling was soon revealed. The cameras were back on him as one of his caretakers grabbed the heavy snake’s tail and lifted it up into a conveniently placed wheelbarrow.
Malu knew what this meant. Tomorrow he would feed again and first he had to make room. Slowly his wide slit parted as he pressed, his lower body forming an S in order to expel the useless remnants of his various prey. As usual, the first log, the one containing all the fur of the many long digested creatures, was the biggest one. His cloaca, almost like his gullet, was impressively stretchy, showing thinly spread pink flesh draped around a firm dark log as wide as a man’s knees. The view of this slow, laborious process and the knowledge of this being essentially the zipped version of his last meal, was incredibly appealing to many watchers of his feeding streams.
The zoo workers revelled at the pace fresh donations poured in while processed canines were slowly forced out of their star predator. Bit by firm dry bit the fur laden log of waste slipped out of the reptilian beast. After that first behemoth was well and truly out of Malu’s system, things went much more smoothly both in terms of speed and consistency. The following pieces of waste were much smaller, almost round as they were just fresh out of the snake’s tightly winding lower intestine. One after the other slipped out until finally a pair of thinner, firmer logs made up of grainy, bright gray stuff topped it all off.
With his business concluded, Malu slithered away from the wheelbarrow, allowing the camera crew to get a really nice shot of just how far one single snake had filled it up. “All of that shit used to be barking a week ago” was the label of the video in the end.