I was a bit startled this week when, wading through the usual flood of junk mail in my letter box, I found a list of special offers from a pet shop, including one for something called a "snake starter kit". It turns out that a snake starter kit is not just a mammy snake and a daddy snake. But it does contain a snake, along with other slimy sounding things such as a "heat pad", a "vivarium lid" and a booklet on "good reptile care". All for the special price of £69.95. ("You save £25.")
Now there are not many things I'm certain of but one of them is that I don't need a snake starter kit, even at such a tempting price. What worries me is that every other house on the road got the same flier and I can't be so sure about other people's needs. It's disturbing to contemplate but, even now, I could be living next door to a snake-starter.
I know people will tell me that the sort of reptiles available from pet shops are not dangerous. But I say neither was our neighbours' cat, or so we used to think.
As regular readers will know, my wife and I are members of a pet-sharing scheme, under which two of the local cats spend most of their lives round at our place. This way, we get to have part-time pets but without the food and veterinary expenses, or having to worry about their education.
The scheme works pretty well, although there were some difficulties early on. Not with the male cat, who has always confined himself to harmless male activities like lying around and flicking channels on the remote control. No. The problem was the female cat, who insisted on doing useful things around the house - like pulling lumps out of the carpet and checking that our curtains had the proper chewed-at-the-bottom look.
So useful was this cat becoming that we decided she should spend more time outside - 100 per cent more time, if possible. And this, we think, is when she turned into a cold-blooded killer.
Yes, one evening recently, the she-cat turned up at the patio door with a rodent in her mouth. She looked very proud of herself and my wife - a keen student of nature - was almost equally proud. "That's the highest honour a cat can bestow on you, you know," she explained. And it was obvious from the cat's expression that she wanted to bestow it personally - on our laps if possible.
I preferred to think that the rodent was a mouse - or, at worst, part of a neighbour's hamster starter kit ("Special price £14.95: you save £5"). But I had reason to suspect it was a baby rat - particularly from one give-away clue, which was my wife saying: "Oh my God, I think it's a baby rat!" Whatever it was, I knew that the cat was never, ever getting inside our patio door again.
But the cat, for her part, could not understand why we wouldn't open the door and, in order to miaow at us plaintively, she put the rodent down a moment. And then we realised: the rodent wasn't dead! Of course it wasn't. Because cats don't just kill things - they have to torture them first. And not for any useful reason, like to get the names of other rodents from them. No, torturing small animals is just a cat thing to do.
It was Nightmare On Elm Street, on our patio. We watched in horror as the cat pawed the rodent around a bit, like a chef tossing scrambled eggs. Then she'd miaow at us in a voice that said: "C'mon guys, let me in. We'll roll the rodent around the carpet all night. It'll be fun." Then she'd paw it a bit more, in case we were missing the point.
Now, rodents are not very high on the list of things I like (coming just above The Spice Girls, in fact). But finally, I couldn't stand it anymore and I went off to find a heavy implement with which to finish off the rodent (and maybe, I was thinking, the cat).
By the time I returned, however, the rodent had done the wise thing, and passed on to that great cheese factory in the sky. And immediately, sensing that its entertainment potential had taken a nosedive, the cat stopped rolling it around. Instead she just miaowed at us, clearly saddened that her actions - straight out of the How To Be A Good Cat textbook - were not appreciated.
Lover of nature on not, my wife was no more inclined than I to open the door. But she found it "heart-breaking" that we couldn't reward the cat for her efforts to protect the neighbourhood. Eventually we compromised and passed some milk out the window, using a piece of string and a 40-foot pole. (We did this while making clear to the cat that in no way did we condone torture).
So now as we watch our part-time pet skulking around the local rooftops, we tend to see her in a different light. Exercises which we used to think were the behaviour of a feline village idiot, we now know are military manoeuvres, involving targets miles away and invisible to the human eye. We respect the cat more; we just don't like her as much.
And she is only one of the colourful animals who populate our suburban cul-de-sac. There's also the fox who lurks in the bushes the night before bin day. And of course there's Bonzo, the community dog, who barks everybody off to work in the morning, welcomes them home in the evening, and is trained to deter burglars by rolling over and demanding to be tickled until the gardai arrive.
And I'm sure our road is like any other. My point is, with such colourful wildlife already around us, who needs snakes? Probably lots of people, is the answer. Presumably the pet shop offer is just one more sign of the booming economy and the amount of disposable income around these days. In the hierarchy of needs, you have to get a long way up before you come to "pet snake".
I just hope all these new reptile owners need permits. Not that a licence requirement makes much difference, judging by the news this week that only one in five of the nation's three quarters of a million dogs have one.
I'm sure Bonzo is one of the legal ones, incidentally. And our part-time cat also has that smug look that says "I'm licenced": though, in her case, she means "to kill".