Nicolas Cage’s wild menagerie included a two-headed snake
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Nicolas Cage could like animals far more than he enjoys income. The eccentric actor is mentioned to have burned by way of some $150 million — blown on eccentric splurges this kind of as a 67-million-12 months-outdated dinosaur head, a pair of islands and the very first “Superman” comic — but his exotic pets are a continual. He’s cared for snakes, crows, cats, turtles, fish and at least a single octopus.
As unveiled in the April concern of GQ, protecting his menagerie will come with troubles and pleasures. Whilst fussing over his Maine coon cat, Merlin, he explained to the magazine, “He’s so type and so loving. In some cases he places his arm about me when he’s sleeping and I imagine it’s my wife … ”
Cage at the time owned a two-headed snake, ordered for $80,000 right after he dreamed about a two-headed eagle. But it was double trouble feeding the reptile so he donated it to the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans.
“Both heads had been entirely purposeful and capable of swallowing,” Robert Mendyk, curator of herpetology at the zoo, informed The Article. “We had to get turns feeding each individual head and area a rubber spatula concerning the heads to reduce a person head from preventing more than the other head’s foods.”
Here is an accounting of Cage’s typically uncaged flock, earlier and present.
Huginn the speaking crow
Cage’s crow life inside a geodesic dome in the actor’s Las Vegas household. No ordinary fowl, this superior-flyer possesses a shock of white feathers up front and essentially talks. Even though Cage was at first drawn to the Edgar Allan Poe connotations of the crow, he now would seem to get a kick out of the point that Hoogin calls him names. As he advised the LA Situations, “When I depart the space, he’ll go ‘bye’ and then go, ‘Ass.’”
An octopus
Back in the mid 1980s, even though residing in a Hollywood condominium, Cage had a pet octopus that he kept in an aquarium. In accordance to Los Angeles Times, the creature was hiding driving a rock and Cage wanted to pry it free for the reward of a customer. It squirted ink on his hand and he responded, “What a pity. Just when we ended up beginning to get along.”
King cobras Moby and Sheba
Through an look on “Late Evening with David Letterman,” Cage informed the present host about his pair of king cobras: a woman named Sheba and an albino male who went by Moby.
“I have them guiding two personal computer locked doorways [with] bullet-evidence glass,” he said. “I like to go in there in my purple leather chair and consume wine and enjoy them as they check out me.”
Cage took pains to level out that if he obtained bitten, he would have just 15 minutes to reside and that he retained antidote nearby, just in situation. He added that just one of the snakes pets — due to the fact donated to a zoo — routinely tried to hypnotize him just before lunging. “After that,” he explained to Letterman, “I say, ‘Goodnight little ones,’ go upstairs and lie down and believe about what just transpired.’”
Harvey the two-headed snake
Cage named his two-headed snake Harvey, in homage to the two-confronted “Batman” villain Harvey Dent. The reptile, which handed away very last September at the age of 14 (really excellent, thinking of that, in accordance to Mendyk, “most embryos with the condition do not efficiently hatch”), caught the extravagant of director Werner Herzog who directed Cage in “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.”
Cage was web hosting a bash in the Huge Easy and brought out the snake, to the horror of his friends. Herzog, however, stated, “Now, Nicolas, we have to set that into the film.” As Cage discussed it to Interview magazine, “I mentioned, ‘No, I’m not placing it into the movie mainly because this is personalized.’ So he loaded the motion picture with snakes, iguanas and alligators, but he never received my two-headed snake.”
Speckled Asian drinking water monitor lizard
Once the reptile grew to be a 5-foot-very long animal of prey, the actor did not have time to treatment for it appropriately. No issue: Wild Daily life Discovery Heart, in Lake Forest, Illinois, happily took it off his palms.
Cage evidently shipped it there in an right away FedEx box. But, as Centre curator Rob Carmichael told Gazebo News, the huge lizard named Michael arrived no worse for dress in: “He has a couple dings and demands to be fattened up a little bit. But, total, he’s in very superior form. The following working day [after arriving], he dined on quail, mice and rats — yummy to a major, predatory lizard.”
