Don't Eat Me Mr. Snake, I'll Be Your Friend

This is a story that is dying to become a parable, a modern Aesopian fable.

From an AP story:

TOKYO - Gohan and Aochan make strange bedfellows: one's a 3.5-inch dwarf hamster; the other is a four-foot rat snake. Zookeepers at Tokyo's Mutsugoro Okoku zoo presented the hamster — whose name means "meal" in Japanese — to Aochan as a tasty morsel in October, after the snake refused to eat frozen mice.

But instead of indulging, Aochan decided to make friends with the furry rodent, according to keeper Kazuya Yamamoto. The pair have shared a cage since.

"I've never seen anything like it. Gohan sometimes even climbs onto Aochan to take a nap on his back," Yamamoto said.

Here's the story as I think Aesop would have told it:

A snake was captured by some people and put into a cold glass prison where other people came and stared at him all day long. He no longer had family or friends around and he got really sad and lonely even though the people fed him really delicious frozen rats all the time. He got so depressed that even the frozen rats no longer made him happy so he stopped eating and told the people that he wanted a friend. The next day they dropped a furry hamster into the glass prison. "Don't eat me, Mr. Snake! I'll be your friend!" The snake was really happy now even though the hamster is scared shitless and is depressed because he no longer has friends or family around.

The moral? (Because there always has to be one at the end of Aesop's fables.) Misery loves company!