G’EA (ISRAEL) – For eight-year-old Israeli girl Inbar, her favourite companion in her backyard pool during a hot day is a pet python.
The 11-foot reptile is named Belle after the namesake in Walt Disney’s animated movie “Beauty and the Beast”. The serpent is one among the several pets in Inbar’s family and they live on an animal sanctuary in an agricultural community in southern Israel.
With the pandemic-induced lockdown keeping schools closed for the past few weeks, Inbar says Belle is good company in the pool.
“It helps me pass the time because I really like to hang out with snakes and sometimes I help snakes shed (their skin) and I help them to be happy during coronavirus,” Inbar said.
Her mother Sarit Regev said the two grew up together.
“Inbar was raised with all these animals and she was raised with the snakes. When Inbar was little she swam inside the bath with the snake and now she has grown up and the snake got bigger, so they swim together in the pool. It’s very natural for us,” she said.
“There are people that say – ‘you are crazy, how can you do it, you don’t love your kids,'” said Regev. “It’s a lovely life to live like this. When a kid grows up with animals he becomes a person that loves other people, he becomes a person that cares about others and not about himself,” she said.
