- Type: Art Audio File
- Collection: European Art
- Culture/Region: Europe
- Subject Area: Visual Arts
- Grade Level: 9-12, College, Adult
English zoologist and writer Edward Turner Bennett describes constrictors in The Tower Menagerie (1829), a collection of anecdotes about animals kept in the British Royal Family’s zoo. According to Turner:
The extent of muscular power which these serpents possess in common with the Boas is truly wonderful. To the smaller among them the lesser quadrupeds and even birds fall an easy prey; but the larger, when excited by the stimulus of hunger, are capable of crushing within their spiral folds the largest and most powerful of beasts. The sturdy buffalo and the agile stag become alike the victims of their fatal embrace; and the bulk of these animals presents but little obstacle to their being swallowed entire by the tremendous reptile, which crushes them as it were into a mass, lubricates them with the fetid mucus secreted in its stomach, and then slowly distending its jaws and oesophagus to an extent proportioned to the magnitude of the object to be devoured and frequently exceeding by many times its own previous size, swallows it by one gradual and long-continued effort.