Pet That Scares Most People to Death Curls Around Toddler: Watch

A Michigan dad – and professional snake handler – is taking some flak for allowing his toddler to play with a what he says is a misunderstood and unfairly maligned family pet.

It’s not a dog. Goodness no.

“If you research the facts, there are 95 percent more dog attacks than snakes,” Jamie Guarino, 34, of White Lake, told UK-based Barcroft TV.

UPDATE: Local prosecutors ask Michigan Department of Human Services to investigate family for child abuse and neglect.

That is no doubt a small comfort to the 1.5 million people who have viewed a video Guarino shot of his at-the-time 14-month old toddler, Alyssa, rolling on the floor not just with any old snake – say, a meek garter snake – but a 13-foot Burmese python named Nay-Nay.

Guarino has raised Nay-Nay since he was barely more than a string. The reptile is among several Alyssa, now 3, and Guarino’s other daughter, Krista, 9, handle in the approximately 105 videos on his SnakeHuntersTV channel on YouTube and his website.

Guarino is on a public relations campaign of sorts to dust off the Burmese python’s reputation.

He said he shot the video because he wants more people to see snakes, demonized since Biblical times, as loving pets. Guarino said Alyssa was perfectly safe as she romped with the reptile. He was in “complete control” of the situation, he said, and could have overpowered Nay-Nay.

“I was trying to show that snakes are not evil creatures, they can be a loving pet despite their bad reputation,” he said. “My daughter was absolutely in no danger.”

Still, “when people see the way Nay-Nay is with Alyssa they mostly react with fear or negativity and I don’t understand why,” said Guarino, a snake handler since he was 16.

But it isn’t as if people just started talking badly about Burmese pythons, one of the five largest snakes in the world, for no good reason.

Carnivores, they’re generally docile, National Geographic says, but they’re also constrictors with extremely strong muscles and stretchy ligaments in their jaws that allow them to swallow their food whole.

That’s after grasping their prey with sharp teeth in a lightning fast strike, coiling their bodies around the animal and squeezing the life out of it.

“Attacks on handlers, sometimes deadly, are not uncommon,” National Geographic says.

A couple of incidents – including a famous case in 1996 in reported by The New York Times in which a python kept by two brothers in a Bronx housing project killed one of them after possibly mistaking him for food – haven’t done much to enhance public confidence in pythons as cuddly pets.

In a more recent case in August 2013, a python escaped from an exotic pet store below an apartment and strangled two young Canadian boys as they slept, National Geographic reports.

So it’s no surprise that when asked by the Detroit Free Press what he thought about Guarino letting his young daughters play with pythons, retired naturalist Joe Derek of Farmington Hills said it’s just plain “stupid.”

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“This guy’s being extremely irresponsible, and that’s a little scary,” Derek said. “The reaction from a snake like that would be a split-second, and it would be faster than you could almost blink.”

Guarino said he’s inspired by “The Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin – who died at 44 after a stingray stabbed him in the heart – and eventually hopes to have a television series educating people about pythons.

“I think the benefits of raising children around exotics is simple, they can open up their mind to something different rather than your average pet,” he told Barcroft TV. “To those of you who might see this as irresponsible or dangerous, please don’t judge me based on fear or something you don’t understand.”